Karen Armstrong

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.

Books
	The Case for God Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao.
	The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford.
	Islam; A Short History No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular imagination as an extreme faith that promotes terrorism, authoritarian government, female oppression, and civil war.
	Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World In 1095 Pope Urban II summoned Christian warriors to take up the cross and reconquer the Holy Land. Thus began the holy wars that would focus the power of Europe against a common enemy and become the stuff of romantic legend.
	The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions In the ninth century BCE, events in four regions of the civilized world led to the rise of religious traditions that have endured to the present day - the development of Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India
	The Battle for God; A History of Fundamentalism One of the most startling developments of the late twentieth century has been the emergence within every major religious tradition of a militant piety popularly known as fundamentalism. Its manifestations are sometimes shocking.