Our Common Humanity in the Information Age. Principles and Values for Development

Karen Armstrong, Author, Historian of Religion
From 1962 to 1969, Karen Armstrong was a nun in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. 
This was a teaching order, and once she had advanced from postulant and novice to 
professed nun, she was sent to St Anne's College, Oxford University, where she studied 
English. Armstrong left the order during her course of study. After graduating, she 
embarked on a doctorate (still at Oxford) on Alfred, Lord Tennyson. She continued to 
work on it while later teaching at the University of London, but her thesis was rejected by 
an external examiner. She eventually left academia without completing her doctorate.
This period was marked by ill-health (Armstrong's life -long, but at that time 
undiagnosed, epilepsy as described in The Spiral Staircase (2004)) and her readjustment 
to outside life. In 1976, she became an English teacher at a girls' school in Dulwich, but 
her epilepsy caused her to miss too many school days, and she was asked to leave in 
1981.
Armstrong published Through the Narrow Gate in 1982, which described the restricted 
and narrow life she experienced in the convent (and earned her the enmity of many 
British Catholics). In 1984 she was asked to write and present a documentary on the life 
of St. Paul. The research for the documentary made Armstrong look again at religion, 
despite having abandoned religious worship after she left the convent. She has since 
become a prolific, acclaimed, and controversial writer on subjects touching on all of the 

---

176 | Our Common Humanity in the Information Age 
three major monotheistic religions. In 1999, the Islamic Center of Southern California 
honored Armstrong, for "promoting understanding among faiths."
Armstrong has written a number of articles for The Guardian. Her latest book, The Great 
Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, was published in March 
2006; her next book, a short biography of Muhammad, is scheduled for the fall of 2006 
from Atlas Books/HarperCollins.