Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator on comparative religion who spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun before leaving the convent and, in time, orthodox belief. She has written more than twenty books, among them A History of God and Fields of Blood, which examines how far religion actually accounts for human violence and how often it has been blamed for causes that were not its own. Her argument across all of it is that compassion, rather than doctrine, is what the major traditions hold in common.