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i had been a nun when i was a young girl i looked to have nothing to do with religion ever again. then a series of career disasters occurred when after the letter and i found myself much to my surprise on television presenting some programs, rather controversial programs quite angry about religion when it was just opening and then that career folded and i went off and wrote to the history of god. in the process of writing "a

history of god" i was on peanut butter sandwiches, virtually no money but it was a formative period because in that time, the experience searching that dhaka, completely changed my outlook on religion. >> host: in what way? >> guest: well, for one thing, i was alone. and i -- all of my television friends melted away with my leaving the tv world. i was on my own head in silence. theology is poetry and it really can't learn to read a poem with a whole lot of malaise you need to put yourself in a certain kind of zone and often receptive. so the silence helped.

i found that with having something. and there was no one egging me on to be outrageous in front of the camera. it was just me and the text so the text started to speak to me in a different way. and the second thing it encountered a footnote in a very learned book which quoted the french who said that the history of religions should approach the topic with the silo of compassion and that didn't mean in the sense of physics or chemistry, but the knowledge that you arrive by compassion which doesn't mean feeling sorry for people but putting yourself in their shoes. he said you can't approach the spirituality of the past from the position of a sort of

superior which is what i had been doing all of this time. you had to put yourself on the back burner and enter in a scholarly way of reproducing all of the circumstances in which particular spirituality grew up. the educational, economic, financial, political social circumstances and not leave until you can find yourself feeling the same. of that in those circumstances you would have felt the same in that way you broaden your horizons and make a place for the other in your mind and heart. >> host: karen armstrong, why did you become a nun? >> guest: i was 17 and you know how it is when you are young. you are very sort of an idealistic and stubborn. i wouldn't take advice from my poor parents who were appalled with this idea.

>> host: with a faithful catholics? >> guest: they were catholics. we did catholic white. we did to the cousin and into church on sunday to get it over with. we were not a religious family had all but we went to catholic school because that was what you did. but i wanted to -- with how modeled and difficult adolescence as i thought if i would become a nun i would become budah-like and call -- calm and like the women whom i was surrounded. they all seemed to be cleaning and cooking and scrubbing and looking after the men. the nuns i could see they had their mind on how your things. the idea is when i got in all i

did for years is scrub and cook and clean. [laughter] and i wasn't very good at it. but it was a sort of mixed idea mixed and i was a very shy young girl at that point. i had it emotionally a bit backward. i was a bit scared i think of going into the big world. but you don't stay in just because you are scared of the outside world. you have jumped from the frying pan into the from a year. it's like boot camp or at least it was in those days. the idea is to train you to be tough, to be a strong woman and that meant that you retreated a very harshly in the often. and i had to give it up after seven years. >> host: what happened to your spirituality ones you gave it up? >> guest: i wanted nothing to

do with religion. even that sounds a bit rebellious with a richer the balkans feel. for me it was really just giving up. i had been hopeless in prayer which as you can imagine is a bit of a drawback for a nun. so every morning i would struggle with my meditation and completely fail. i seemed to completely open myself to god and he had taken no notice. once i got outside, he just looked away. no matter how much i tried to bring him into my life he sort of seemed to decline me and offers and it just sort of fell away quite painlessly really. i just thought let's leave that. something i don't want to go back to.

>> host: karen armstrong, 20 plus books on the dog. later -- books on god. where are you spiritually? >> guest: i'm still in recovery but my books are my study and the research i do for it is biform of spirituality. sometimes when i'm sitting at my desk doing signs of compassion, putting oneself to one side and entering into the mind and thoughts of some of the most wonderful things that have been written, i feel moments of uplift, seconds of transcendence now, my jewish friends tell me that i should have been a rabbi because that is what jews do. they don't talk to god, and i can't talk to god. but you study. and by a nursing yourself in that study, and you get lifted

somehow into a higher plane. and also, in the benediction order, they are advised to spend hours every afternoon in what they call devine study where you immerse yourself in a text and you get many seconds of prayer. i suppose that is my form of steven chu levity degette i can't see any one of the religion that i have been studying until now that it's any better than any of the others. i don't see any of the mass superior. each one of them has its own particular genius, its own particular take on what we call the sacred and the good life. and if each has its own particular drawbacks and failings because these are human institutions as sacred ones. so, at the moment it's not -- it's an unorthodox position. but i get nourishment from my

study i think. >> host: what is the most frequent question people ask you? >> guest: what you just asked, where are you now. they asked me about death a lot. surely what religion is about the afterlife. and i am very conscious now that i've come into the last phase of my life. so many people i know who died, and i seem to be heading up there to be next up in nicu as it were. and i have no thoughts about the afterlife. one of the things i've discovered is that is not a religious preoccupation. really it's only christianity and judy is on. -- judaism.

in the eastern traditions the trek is to banish, have reincarnation but enlightenment means you won't be reincarnated you will be somewhere you can't know and there is very little about the afterlife and the bible actually putting it is a leader idea. when paul asked what happened to the faithful when they die said i have not seen a comet year hasn't heard or has it entered into the hearts of the man what god has prepared for those who love him and that is if it is good enough for st. paul it's good enough for me. my feeling is what we have is now. this moment is all we are certain of having and so to live as full and kindly and creatively as you can in that

moment i think constitutes a kind of immortality. >> host: some of the names of karen armstrong's books include quote co-pays for god, the history of god, faith after september 11th and the bible, a biography," going into the history of god has mankind always had a spark of thinking there is a higher power? >> guest: a higher power, though. that is putting it in a western modern way. but a certain sense of transcendence in our minds are so constructed that we naturally had experiences and ideas that we can't explain to the it we think in all kind of the news, music to and there is that moment at the end of the concert

the last note of the symphony die away and there is a beat of silence in the hall and you can't put into words what you feel but that isn't something. people look for it in all kinds of outlets and music and drugs evin and religion has been one of those outlets and religion has always expressed itself best in terms of art and poetry and song and music and architecture and painting. it's not so much words as long as the words fadeaway, good theology should put you to live for the moment in that beat of silence where you realize you have come to the end of what fox and words can do. we seek these moments out

because we feel that we are inhibiting the humanity more full than usual. we feel that it is lifted up and you can't say what it is. that's week we have always said. that is our minds are. and also creatures that worry. we have anxiety where dogs don't seem to have an anxiety beyond the condition or what will happen to them or the plight of dogs. we do we and we can fall very easily in to despair if we can't find some meaning in our lives and that quest for some kind of meaning goes back to the case of southern france where you have are to and religion and hard work. if you go anywhere to paint those things it is about a mile into the mountain, a mile

underground. a very dangerous coming and we see those paintings more clearly than they ever were because they were just working with looker in little matches. but in favor dealing with the perplexity of how you live with the fact you have to kill other creatures that stone age man who haven't developed agriculture was entirely dependent on and looking at these and honoring them in some way and coping with the hope through art some kind of cult that went on, so that is what we have always done. but it is hard work. and it isn't just a question of popping into church and singing a couple hymns are then you get

enlightenment instantly as i thought. it requires a constant going beyond selfishness. >> host: this is a terrible question but what is the history of organized religion. when did it begin? >> guest: i would say looking back probably to when you probably start having cities and states, pre-history of course we don't know how they organize things. once you have the organization of the state for many states and the beginning of federal cultural settlements that is in the religion until the modern pogo every single political organization or political ideology. there was no part of life which was cut off as we do in a modern period. the romans had no idea of

religion and private activity, nor was religion confined one day a week or certain times of the day. it was involved in the great even if you like. it was a non-modern period taking religion out. it's like taking it out of the cocktail. it is of huge everything and now we are trying to attract. there are good reasons for that. but, so ii think once you have people living together they struggle with the difficulties of living together and the difficulties of having to live on as a community organizing the economy organizing warfare with the rival communities wanting your resources. and even religion gets kind of state a fight in a sense it becomes part of the apparatus of

the state. >> host: what about christianity and judaism? >> guest: they all worship the same god and is on for example it's been very clear in the koran if you also believe in jesus and abraham and moses and all of the great profits of the past. and they all sense of the divine and the working of history that somehow the divine is known in current events that it's not likely the buddhists where you extract yourself and say history is passing and it has nothing to tell us. a jewish christians and muslims

scrutinize quite hard and struggle with it. the profits of israel for example. they are like political commentators. very much commenting on the turbulent history of the middle east in their time looking at the great empire, looking at all of the political problems and trying to find a hand of god and islam is the same throughout their history muslims have agonized about this state of the muslim community which is supposed to be a just and decent society. and so, when nbc the community in the hands of the corrupt and ineffective leaders or the community sort of defamed by foreign people or humiliated or disgraced they can have the same kind of dismay for the christians to see the bible desecrated.

so the great especially in the early days of islam, the great spiritualities and jurisprudence, philosophy. they all developed from a political contemplation of the present degette how do we find goned or serve god in these particular circumstances to the >> host: does that lead to fundamentalism when people are upset? >> guest: no. upset, yes. every fundamentalist movement i'd studied in their religions has begun with what is the sort by the secular or the liberal establishment. and in christianity for example what begins in the united states in the north and in chicago in fact when the liberal members of the chicago divinity school at the university attack the

institute, a much more conservative school on the other side of town and tell them it's world war i that they are on the side of the germans. and they hit back and that's when it begins. it's very much a response to modernization. modernization is difficult. we are now -- we have gotten through to the other side of it. but it took us 300 years and you're not to develop a modern society. it was a time of great turbulence with the war of religion, the bloody revolutions followed by dictatorships, followed by the abuse of children and women in the factories and the countryside and now we look at other parts of the world going through the same process and lead to b.c., bloody revolutions, means of

terror, war of religion the modernization is advanced and it's not just a question of getting a few skyscrapers or computer jets it is a question of reorganizing or society around a different kind of economy. >> host: you have also written of the city of jerusalem. why is jerusalem jerusalem? >> guest: why is it such a problem, you mean? >> host: why did become the place where all free -- or three of the major religions of the world claim the conflict etc? >> guest: well, we are talking about just earlier the concentration of history and historical events and the fact that judaism is very keen to the people of israel and their history in biblical times. and that jesus died there for example. they made a sort of central place.

most -- the cultivation of a holy place is one of the oldest and most universal forms of religious expression. pilgrimage to the holy place, you find it in absolutely every culture. it's one of the earliest reported. and it seems to be certain. it is a form -- before we met our world scientifically, we developed a sort of sacred geography where certain places or absolutely central and gave a sense of where we are. so, and in islam it was only to the muslims and jews, christians and jews whose profits the celebrated and the muslim koran. you have shrines dedicated to the profits of israel. there is a profit for jesus as

well as for mohammed. so it is, again, a sense of expressing that sense of continuity with the past. it becomes a sort of contested place when people think they -- it belongs to them and that is the issue. according to the whole the place is that it doesn't belong to anyone, it belongs to god and you somehow have to sort of negotiate that. once you start saying me and my and you are beginning to lose the plot but it's part of that universal urge to sort of say muslims for example or jews or christians, it's oriented to face darussalam. people are buried facing jerusalem as it were.

it's saying where do i belong? where am i headed? when they turn five times a day to words meca, the action is to say where is meca now, it is an exercise that says where am i going with my life? you entered of your work, whenever you are doing and you played yourself in the direction where you feel you should be going. it's a reminder of what your plea of these were and that is something that occurs every faith, just a reminder of where am i headed? where is my true center. >> host: you are watching book tv on c-span2 and we are visiting london talking with british authors. today author karen armstrong the author of over 20 books about religion. while we are taking this, ms. armstrong, there is an election of the pope going on.

what is your fault of the whole process? >> guest: i thought there must be a simpler way but perhaps that is and kind. who has really founded these people? they were having problems triet my feeling is that it isn't much different who is elected because i think that the last to have been very conservative and john paul ii have a long time to plan the conservative bishops and cardinals and all the great sea is so i think it will be one of those. but some people have been catholics become kind of professionals as it were. if they are not catholic anymore they feel it is their duty.

i don't at all. i'm very grateful to the catholic church because it's a virtual and formed me and i don't have -- i have a much more catholic sold than protestant taking the scripture much more lightly than protestants. and i find now they've lost it of course the duty which i have learned it is a spiritual thing that i am very grateful for. but when it comes to the vatican my heart just sinks in all these scandals there's been a sex abuse cases i wish we could have a polk that says we lost the plot. sex abuse, this has to stop.

we've got to speak kindly now. we've got to look at the things the church has done to people and persecuted people when the past and let us repented that life is moving forward in some way and charity and peace towards the rest of humanity and reach out. that is the challenge of our world i think for religious people not to be stuck in your own little box, but who deal with the fact that we are sharing the world now and many people who are very different from us and unless we learn to treat one another, whoever they are, with great respect and compassion, we are not going to have a viable world because however separate and special we think we are, the reality is we cannot live without one another.

we are interdependent as never before stocks fall and one part of the world, markets plummeted all the way around the globe. economists will tell us a poor economy in africa will rebel bomb london and new york. we are linked together by the world wide web. the or politically july and so that what happens in afghanistan can have repercussions in london and new york so we have created this global market. this is our own creation, this interdependence. the assumptions haven't caught up with this yet. we can sit back from it and the world -- if we don't achieve a global outlook, i think the world will come to us in a

terrible form. >> host: one of your recent books is a letter to pakistan. what is that about? >> guest: i've been to pakistan a great deal. because they are hungry i think and i eighth won the prize in 2008 which gives you a wish for a better world they will try to make happen and i suggested the charter for compassion for deutsch was written by leading activists the book is representing six of the major world faiths. as a sign that despite our many differences on the issue of compassion and the golden rule we were all in agreement and we could write this together. one of the people let's pick up is pakistan which is one of the leaders of the charter so i went

out there and be read they can literally in thousands and they were working to create the compassion of schools. so when i came out there, the person who was bringing me, the young businessman said your book -- i wrote a book called stilwell steps toward compassionate life, he said it's an important book and very expensive so can you persuade your publisher to raise the rates in pakistan so that it can be ever so cheap or else let the oxford university press that has a huge franchise to a very cheap edition of its? they will never agree to that, when hell freezes over. in a weak moment, i heard these

words coming out of my mouth and tried to pull them back. i could write a little look especially for pakistan this weekend during the 12 steps to a compassionate life from a pakistani muslim perspective and looking at that in islamic terms that is what it was and so we divide the need to invite and scholars and journalists to comment and i said this is your letter and your charter, make of it what you wish. after that my publisher then said of course we will waive their rights so they also did a cheap addition of the 12 steps, too. >> host: witold steps? >> guest: alcoholics anonymous, of course. because compassion required is the golden rule, never treat others how you wouldn't wish to

be treated yourself. it requires you to look into your heart and discover what gives you pain and then under no circumstances whatsoever to inflect this pain on anyone else. confucius, the first person to enunciate the golden rule as far as we know said do it all day and every day. here in england we have a habit of saying something we've done something nice for someone to be you can then return for the next 23 hours with your usual greed and selfishness. we are addicted to our egotism. we wouldn't have been able to survive as a species but we also addicted in our hatred to our likes and dislikes. we don't know what we had done without them because the people that we really disliked are

often a foil to our own sense. we are everything that those people are not so we depend upon them like an alcoholic depends upon the drink. sometimes when you say something about your ex-wife or boss or people with whom umar at war, you can get a sort of rush of righteousness and this first drink of the evening or of the day if you are an alcoholic, it gives you that kind of rush and pride for the moment. so this is an addiction and we can only wean ourselves from that gradually as they do in alcoholics anonymous day-by-day and step by step. i gradually incorporating a more

impact at ways of looking into your daily living and i believe why i have a sense of urgency about this is unless we learn to implement the golden rule globally so that we treat all people, whoever they are as we would wish to be treated ourselves, the world isn't going to be a wonderful place. >> host: karen armstrong, another one of your books face after september 11th. we were told by many politicians in the state we were not at war necessarily with islam that islamic terrorists. >> guest: i would say the word islamic terrorist is and really valid. they are criminals, these are criminal acts. when you keep saying islamic

terrorism, you get the sense that islam is very easily into terror. this isn't so. but often the discourse about islam is really very scary in the west. sometimes i asked to write a piece that something comes up in the news and i write a piece and say what the islamic position is. and the volume of hate mail that i get is shocking. this time last year i was in canada and they asked me to do a piece on islamophobia in canada. and i hope was of so that we appalled at the first 500 threatening letters and in the mail which was really sort of ugly stuff coming out. i had -- fees were not religious

fanatics or people on the far right. i write for a good liberal paper here in london. people would say we are going to come burn down your house. all of this goes right down and it is a gift to the extremists who can then point to their disaffected followers to say look the islam, they hate our profits. we can't reach an accommodation with warfare and terror is the only way that we have. so you know, of course the administration was careful to say this isn't a war against religion but it has segued into that in people's mind. i wish the media could do a better job of some however publishing's -- publishing that that goes against the grain to

get a perspective. women are working better for my charter them christians and jews it has to be said. the largest muslim organization in the usa, canada formed a charter last september. and introducing compassion into their own schools, to train the leaders of tomorrow and setting up compassionate mosques which our agenda friendly and engaging interfaith discussions in the communities. so no religion is perfect. we all have our criminals and the sooner we learned to separate these criminals and also see where they are coming from and not just assume that

it's islam that russia is them to do this -- if they had been doing these act so for the last 1500 years were in fact islam has a much better record of tolerance than christianity, western christianity at least it's only in the last 100 years or so the results of colonialism and of the disruption of colonialism that these unfortunate movements have arisen. but muslims are appalled by the events such as september 11th, as are we. >> host: three final questions. if people wish to contact you, do you have a website? >> guest: the best place to do is charterforcompation.org and then you can probably reach me there.

>> host: professor graley has been part of our series here in london and wrote the book in 2011 and atheistic take on the bible. but he said in his interview that he has friends who are high authorities in the church of england who don't believe the resurrection happened. did the resurrection happen in? >> guest: look, the gospel doesn't tell us that man walks out. people have a very simplified view of what the resurrection is. the gospel only tells us what people's experience is. this is not a corpse walking out of the tomb because jesus is here one minute and then he disappears the next. suddenly they see him and

another person. you know, walking along. the story of the road is instructive here i think. you know, the story they stepped up to the crucifixion and the two of them it's important that they not tell which because this is all of us. they are walking along and they are distressed and a stranger walks beside them and says look, you seem very upset. anything i can do to help? i think just as well we are absolutely fine and that would have been the end. instead the open the fire and this stranger said you thought

that poor sap was the messiah that they opened themselves and. making such a claim this would change their view of religion. change the review of their religion and the messiah. they come along at the end of the evening and they say stay with us and he comes in and he breaks the red and at that moment, he vanishes debate again, human bodies just don't do that. and they say don't you remember our hearts burned with us as we walked along the way. and what he is saying i think is how we know is first in the scripture, discussing the scripture with one another when

two or three gather and my name there i am in the next of them come and in the breaking of bread and in the stranger which is what jews and pagans were doing in the communities, mixed communities of jews and gentiles living with one another, learning to accommodate one another. living with -- warning about their difficulties and their ego we are reading our scripture in such an unimaginative way did it happen, did it not happen? this is our modern cut and dry view of history. there was a call to action and luke is here getting a call to action. this is what you do if you want

to know there is a jesus. paul is the first account we have of the resurrection and he is talking about the vision. he appeared -- none of this appears in the gospel, it is first to peter and then james and finally, he says to me and his own vision on the road to damascus the division to the apostles. it doesn't stop there. why did it happen, right there our lives changed. it is a summons to change your life to a new kind of life. to live according to the new kind of humanity that jesus tried to sketch out. >> host: finally, karen armstrong why do you think your books sell so well in the u.s.? >> guest: i am a bit of a prophet recognized in her own country that there is a great hunger in the u.s. and i think

i'm very interested in religion. so, you know, a great three yes -- curiousness. they think that all of us are fundamentalist and not at all, i do know. people -- very exciting things are happening in the world. people are very, very open. they want to, you know, things to make sense. they very generously allow me to help in that conversation >> host: we have been talking on booktv with author karen armstrong. this is book tv on c-span2 in london. for more information on these and other interviews from london, visit