An authority on world faiths, comparative religions and monotheism, Karen Armstong is a former Roman Catholic nun who left the convent to study modern literature. She describes herself as a “Freelance Montheist,” and her mediations on personal faith and religion spark worldwide debate and discussion—especially her view of fundamentalism, which she sees in a historical context as an outgrowth of modern culture.

Armstrong's best-sellers include the landmark books A History of God and The Battle for God, which The New York Times calls “one of the most penetrating, readable and prescient accounts to date of the rise of the fundamentalist movements in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.” Through the Narrow Gate, about her seven years in the convent, led to controversy in the Catholic community; a later book, The Spiral Staircase, about her subsequent spiritual awakening—when she began to develop her iconoclastic take on the great monotheistic religions—was an instant best-seller. Her other books include Islam: A Short History, Faith After September 11th, and biographies on Muhammad and Buddha. The Great Transformation: The Beginnings of Our Religious Traditions was hailed by The Washington Post as “Armstrong at her best—translating and distilling complex history into lucid prose.” Her latest book is The Bible: A Biography.

Karen Armstrong was a key advisor on Bill Moyers' popular PBS series on religion, has addressed members of the US Congress, and was one of three scholars to speak at the UN's first ever session on religion. She is a recipient of the 2008 TED Prize. She will use her prize money to write The Charter for Compassion, a two-page document that seeks to build a universal framework to understand religion around the world.

Karen Armstrong presents a thorough and compelling account of the history of fundamentalism in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. She sees the continued growth of fundamentalist movements as a response to a technologically driven world with liberal Western values. This opposition has resulted in many fundamentalists becoming more extreme and violent, leading to such events as the Oklahoma City bombing, violent anti-abortion crusades, and the assassination of President Yitzak Rabin. Religious fundamentalism stands at the heart of many of the most intractable conflicts in the world today; from the continued failure of Israel and the Palestinians to make a lasting peace to the influence of fundamentalist Christians in the US. By looking objectively at the origins and growth of fundamentalism and its opposition to modernism in all its forms Armstrong provides a unique insight into politics and international affairs. By tackling head on this emotionally charged field she produces a lecture that can only be described as profoundly important to an understanding of the modern world, its conflicts and the prospects for a future peace.

In this talk Karen Armstrong speaks to the troubling years following her decision, in 1969, to walk away from the life of a Roman Catholic nun, after failing to find God. Her inspiration for The Spiral Staircase comes from T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday, where Eliot metaphorically climbs a spiral staircase-turning again and again to what he does not want to see as he slowly makes progress toward the light. In revisiting her own spiral climb out of her dark night of the soul, Armstrong gives us a poignant account about the nature of spiritual growth. With her elegant, humble and brave voice, she inspires us to willingly turn our attention toward our false identities and vigilantly defended beliefs in order to better see the truth and vulnerability of our existence.

In this talk Karen Armstrong traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present day. From classical philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern age of skepticism, she performs the near miracle of distilling the intellectual history of monotheism.

No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular Western imagination as an extreme faith that promotes authoritarian government, female oppression, civil war, and terrorism. Karen Armstrong offers a vital corrective to this narrow view. She argues that the world's fastest-growing faith is a much richer and more complex phenomenon than its modern fundamentalist strain might suggest. Armstrong issues a forceful challenge to those who hold the view that the West and Islam are civilizations set on a collision course.