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  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099524038
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $39.99

The Case for God

What religion really means




An essential book for our times: a thoughtful, cultured response to Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists.

There is widespread confusion about the nature of religious truth. For the first time in history, a significantly large number of people want nothing to do with God. Militant atheists preach a gospel of godlessness with the zeal of missionaries and find an eager audience.

Tracing the history of faith from the Palaeolithic Age to the present, Karen Armstrong shows that meaning of words such as 'belief', 'faith', and 'mystery' has been entirely altered, so that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God - and, indeed, reason itself - in a way that our ancestors would have found astonishing.

Does God have a future? Karen Armstrong examines how we can build a faith that speaks to the needs of our troubled and dangerously polarised world.

  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099524038
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $39.99

About the author

Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong is one of the world's leading commentators on religious affairs. She spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun, but left her teaching order in 1969 to read English at St Anne's College, Oxford. In 1982, she became a full time writer and broadcaster. She is a best-selling author of over 16 books. A passionate campaigner for religious liberty, Armstrong has addressed members of the United States Congress and participated in the World Economic Forum. In 2013 she recieved the British Academy's inaugural Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for improving transcultural understanding.

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Praise for The Case for God

Forget Richard Dawkins - just read it with an open mind

Jeanette Winterson

One of our best living writers on religion...prodigiously sourced, passionately written

Financial Times

A journey through religion that helps us to rescue what remains wise from so much that to many in Britain today no longer seems true... Armstrong is one of the the handful of wise and supremely intelligent commentators on religion

Alain de Botton, Observer

This is a stunned appreciation of an 'otherness' beyond the reach of language, and for Armstrong, constitutes the heart of every religion

New Statesmen

It isn't an easy read - why should it be? - but she is wonderfully clear and insightful - and not out to convert anyone

Daily Mail

A tour de force of learning. A hefty history of theology, philosophy and science, and how they converge, it knocks Dawkins and Hitchens into an intellectual cocked hat...Armstrong rejoices in the unknowableness of life and searches, logically enough for meaning therein

Sunday Herald

Armstrong makes a wise and passionate case for a God of myth rather than reason, of wisdom rather than knowledge

Financial Times

Dense and brilliant, chastening and consoling. Whether or not it sells as well as the latest Hitchens or Dawkins will be a measure of us, not the book

Sunday Times