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Karen Armstrong was interviewed by Jonathan Kirsch, a book columnist for the Los Angeles Times who writes and lectures widely on biblical, literary, and legal top-ics. He is the author of the best-selling and critically acclaimed books King David, Moses: A Life, and The Harlot by the Side of the Road.

JH: Your very first book, Through the Narrow Gate, is a memoir of your experiences as a nun. What convinced you to enter a convent?

KA: Very few of our motivations are simple and clear and pure, and what drew me to the religious life was a complex decision. There certainly was a religious desire - I did want to find God. Of course, there were other less noble reasons, too - I was only seventeen years old, and the whole mess of adolescent confusion was certainly a factor. I was very shy, believe it or not, and I was very scared about how I was going to cope in the big wide world. The convent seemed something familiar. I thought I'd become so holy and wise that I would transcend these con-fusions and lose myself in a sort of being called God and become saintly and happy. But that didn't happen. If you're just seeking to escape your-self, you're not going to stay very long because in the convent you are confronted with yourself twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.

JH: What prompted you to leave the convent?

KA: Why I left is equally complicated. I didn't want to leave at all. I was really frightened to leave. I wasn't thinking, Now I can wear beautiful clothes and fall in love and be free. I left with real dread. I had missed the 1960s, and I came out into an entirely transformed world. But I knew that I had to do it. I knew I wasn't going to be a very good nun. Some women can live a life of complete chastity and still become mature; a life in which they never make any decisions themselves and always obey, and have no per-sonal possessions. But only a few women had done that, and I knew that I wasn't one of them. I knew it wasn't for me. I had to go.

JH: Using the definition of fundamentalism that you offer in The Battle for God, was your stay in the convent a fundamentalist experience?

KA: Yes, in the sense that it was a deliberate attempt to turn my back on the modern world. And there is certainly a sense in which the convent was an embattled community at odds with the world outside - ours was not to wonder why, ours was to do and die. But there were differences, too. A lot of fundamentalists are angry and about to declare war on the world. We never got to that stage. We were in retreat from the world.

JH: You have been remarkably prolific as an author since leaving the convent. What is your writing life like?

KA: I work alone here in my house in London, I work at the library, and I write all the time. I write longhand and then I type the manuscript. It slows down the writing but I think it's a good thing to write more slowly. I am not just a Luddite, forsaking all machinery - I am an epilep-tic due to a birth injury, and I am worried about the effects of sitting in front of a computer screen all day long. But I am finally getting a com-puter because the fact is that they are not making typewriters anymore, and soon the only place you'll find them is in antique shops.

When I'm not writing, I also do a little lecturing and a bit of teaching at the Leo Baeck College in London, but that's a tiny part of my year. I teach Christianity, but there's a Dominican priest at the college who thinks I'm not Christian enough to teach the whole course.

JH: Your books range from biographies of St. Paul (The First Christian) and Muhammad (Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet) and Bud-dha (Buddha) to studies of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (A History of God and Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths). The Battle for God, for example, focuses on fundamentalism in all three Bible-based religions. What interests you in the study of so many different and disparate faiths?

KA: It was the different expressions of faith that drew me back to religion. After I came out of the convent, I was sick to death of religion and I thought that I had completely finished with it. I'd had a bad experience of religion, and I was literally nauseated by it. It's like a bad sexual experience at an early age that can skew you forever. My early books were written in a spirit of great skepticism.

Then I made a trip to Jerusalem to make a documentary on St. Paul, and there I encountered Judaism and Islam as living faiths, vibrant and independent, and yet interconnected with my own. I was intrigued and enthralled, and I realized I had to look into it. The study of Judaism, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity showed me that there was a lot in the monotheistic tradition that I had never encountered and could really relate to, and it drew me back to a greater appreciation of what my own religion was trying to do. I always tried to present the monotheistic religions in a triple vision by trying to see them all as valid ways to God.

Excerpted from The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Tags: Religion and Spirituality

About the Author

Karen Armstrong's first book, the bestselling Through the Narrow Gate, described her seven years as a nun in a Roman Catholic order. She has since published numerous bestselling books, including A History of God, Islam: A Short History, Buddha, The Spiral Staircase and most recently The Great Transformation. She is a freelance writer and she lives in London.