|
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (平装)
by Karen Armstrong
| Category:
Religion, Spirituality, Memoir |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
In Stock |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
An enduring spiritual classic, this book is an intensely personal story about one person's journey in search of God. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
|
| |
AllReviews |
  1 2 Total 2 pages 14 items |
|
|
Gathercoal (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-30 00:00>
Karen Armstrong has given us a candid and engaging memoir. Her love, then hate, then finally acceptance of the Catholic Church and Christianity, is omnipresent throughout the book.
"I wanted to find God" Armstrong states. And so with unflinching honesty, she wrote this memoir about her search through the labyrinths of religions. Her title (from T.S. Eliot poem “Ash Wednesday”) describes her climb out of despair, regrets, setbacks, medical misdiagnoses, academic failures and religion, and how she slowly, painfully, emerges from her darkness to find international success as a writer about religions.
For Karen, "Religion is not about accepting 20 impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you" and by the end of the book, she concludes, that ultimately, God maybe `Nothing': "Perhaps in our broken world we can only envisions an absent God. Maybe the only revelation we can hope for now is an experience of absence and emptiness. The best theologians and teachers have never been afraid to admit that in the last resort, there may be `Nothing' out there."
Throughout the book she doesn't let you forget that she was a nun, damaged by the system, yet because of friends, mentors and a commitment to her spiritual quest, she prevails. Karen Armstrong has a soul-mate with Elaine Pagels [Beyond Belief] and the legions of others who struggle with the dogmas of Christianity and other religions. Highly recommended. |
|
|
Karen Hudson (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-30 00:00>
Karen Armstrong documents her lifelong spiritual journey in her latest book, The Spiral Staircase. I saw her on c-span book talk and was impressed by her sincerity, humility, and intellect. These qualities shine through in her book as well, as she honestly, painstakingly describes her ascending path, which was complicated by undiagnosed epilepsy for many years.
As a Lay Carmelite familiar with our own dark path of "unknowing", I am saddened to read of her early years in the monastery, where she perhaps was undergoing a Carmelite experience which her superiors would or could not comprehend. Her spiritual dryness and emptiness in the midst of yearning for God, would be cardinal signs to one familiar with the works of John of the Cross and St. Teresa.
Armstrong in her maturity is now a wise, tolerant, devout woman who still searches for the ineffable among diverse cultural traditions. Her book will be rewarding for readers no matter what their spiritual path. |
|
|
Beryl Bissell (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-30 00:00>
I first encountered Karen Armstrong thirty or so years ago when I read Through the Narrow Gate. Of the many hundreds of books I have read since then, the memory of that book hummed through my subconscious - perhaps because I'd also entered the convent with the distinct expectation that I, too, would become a mystic. Like Armstrong, I left religious life. Unlike her, I did not lose my faith - I just loosened the institutional Church's hold on it. It was a delight then, to encounter her again in the Spiral Staircase: this honest and wise exploration of the journey she undertook on leaving religious life. What enchants me most about this book is the story behind all those other books she's written - the reclaiming of the voice she lost in the convent, the happenings that led her, step by step, to become an authority on world religions while negotiating her way to a concept of the divine that is beyond thoughts and words. I find in the Spiral Staircase the exposition of what it means to let go of idolatry and open oneself to God. |
|
|
An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-30 00:00>
Spiral Staircase has confirmed what I've always felt about Karen Armstrong: She is an emotional wreck of a woman. A homely introvert, Armstrong mistook her insecurities and immature idealism for a religious calling, ran to the Church looking for the security of acceptance, quickly became disillusioned and suffered a nervous breakdown. All though the Church educated her, was patient with her doubts and accepted her to leaving, she remains to this day antagonistic to the Christian religion. Her bias and resentments to Christianity, has somehow weirdly led her to become one of the foremost academic apologists for Islam. In her work (e.g. A History of God), Armstrong has always seemed unable to maintain any objectivity for Christianity and resorts to absurdly obvious double-standards wherever Islam is concerned.
An overrated, under-credentialed pop scholar, Karen Armstrong needs to grow up and accept reality. Armstrong merely left the shelter of the convent for that of the university. Both hold back the harsh demands of the realities of this world. This is the true dilemma of a Karen Armstrong and all of those thousands of academics just like her. I suggest Karen Armstrong develop the courage and honesty to take a long, extended trip to the Middle East and Africa. Following this, a job working with Catholic charities should also help. (An American reader)
When is a religious vocation a gift from God versus when is it self created? In Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of the Darkness, she presents just such a scenario, giving a compelling and eloquent account of what led her to believe-to her parent's correct contrary belief-that she had a genuine vocation. As a sequel to her first memoir on convent life-Through the Narrow Gate-and as a revision to the original sequel-Beginning the World-Armstrong states in the preface: "...I was very shy and worried about the demands of adult social life...and...Most of my immediate family and friends were nonplussed-even slightly irritated-and I, of course, reveled in the sense of striking out and being just that little bit different." Though Karen Armstrong did have a genuine intellectual curiosity, her reasons for entering convent life, at a remarkable youthful seventeen years of age, she did not at all possess the true hallmark signs of one who has a religious calling: an unexplainable yearning for things that are religious yet relational to humanism, the all enveloping feeling and or mystery of love-love being the paramount word here, as well as the genuine understanding of self-sacrifice and all that it is attached to it. Not once before entering the convent is the word love brought up. She did not have the basic emotional and religious foundation to survive a life of austerity, contemplation, prayer and stringency. If she did, this would have been an entirely different book. Being one of the last groups to enter the novitiate before the emergence of Vatican II, Karen Armstrong was taught under the 'old' school. And indeed, under the old system, some of the behavior and actions could have been considered bizarre, especially the matters of the sewing machine and the casting aside of genuine medical issues and the careless ascription of them to psychosomatic hysteria and self-glorification, among other things. The intense drilling and scrupulousness of sometimes incorrect theology with no room for questions and correct, caring discipline altered what should have been religious joy and love into trauma and unending sorrow. Karen Armstrong wanted to know and feel God, thus her entering into convent life. But she should have felt the loving mystery of God's vocation first. Convent life would have been the enhancement to the religious gift that was imbued within her. So, in essence, she inadvertently used religion in order to create something that was nonexistent in the first place: a religious vocation. What Karen Armstrong managed to achieve when she left the convent is nothing short of the miraculous: teacher, documentary filmmaker, writer, traveler, explorer, scholar. Some people have crosses within religious life, and they grow from it. And it was no different for Armstrong, who suffered from bouts of Anorexia nervosa, jaunts to various psychiatrists, habitual restlessness, firings and epilepsy. But through it all and by studying various faiths-Islam, Judaism, Buddhism - she came full circle to what her vocation really was: writing. But through the process of writing about various religions, her faith was, bit-by-bit, restored and renewed, and in essence, she discovered and felt who she was looking for all the while: herself and God. The Spiral Staircase, though sad in some respects, is also very uplifting, because it clearly illustrates that despite our flawed actions and rash decisions to go against the inherent truth of what is right for us, happiness, as in Armstrong's remarkable case, can still prevail; we just have to meet God halfway. |
|
|
|
1 2 Total 2 pages 14 items |
|
|
|
|
|
|
