Frasi di Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong
Data di nascita: 14. Novembre 1944
Altri nomi: 凱倫·岩士唐, کارن آرمسترانق, Karen Armstrongová
Karen Armstrong è una saggista britannica, autrice di molti libri di religione comparata, ha scritto il bestseller History of God .
Frasi Karen Armstrong
„La teologia è spesso noiosa e astratta, ma la storia di Dio è stata appassionante e intensa.“
Origine: Storia di Dio, p. XIII
„Mentre il Dio di Mosè era stato quello del trionfo, il Dio di Isaia era pieno di dolore.“
Origine: Storia di Dio, p. 47
„The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion.“
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)
Contesto: The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tsu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads.
„You have to practice quite hard, like you do with any art form. Religion is hard work.“
Ode interview (2009)
Contesto: It's not easy to talk about transcendence, just as it's not easy to play or listen to a late Beethoven quartet … You have to practice quite hard, like you do with any art form. Religion is hard work.
„We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.“
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)
Contesto: We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao.
What I now realize, from my study of the different religious traditions, is that a disciplined attempt to go beyond the ego brings about a state of ecstasy. Indeed, it is in itself ekstasis. Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, or self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.
„Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, or self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself.“
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)
Contesto: We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao.
What I now realize, from my study of the different religious traditions, is that a disciplined attempt to go beyond the ego brings about a state of ecstasy. Indeed, it is in itself ekstasis. Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, or self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.
„There are some forms of religion that must make God weep.“
NOW interview (2002)
Contesto: There are some forms of religion that must make God weep. There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too. Religion that has concentrated on egotism, that's concentrated on belligerence rather than compassion. … But then you have to remember that this is what human beings do. Secularism has shown that it can be just as murderous, just as lethal … as religion. Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.
