Fresh Air from WHYY, September 21, 2009

A former nun, Karen Armstrong left her convent in the late 1960s, and for 13 years she distanced herself from organized religion. She ended up working in television, and on an assignment in Jerusalem she had a kind of epiphany about the similarities among the major world religions. It was the study of those religions that allowed her to revisit her own faith. Armstrong published her first book, Through the Narrow Gate, in 1982. Twenty-seven years and more than 20 books later — including the best-selling A History of God — Armstrong releases her latest book, The Case for God. In it, she argues that religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of the mind and heart.