Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

Karen Armstrong

3.8/5 ( ratings)

In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness–diagnosed only years later as epilepsy–marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun. Gripping, revelatory, and inspirational, The Spiral Staircase is an extraordinary account of an astonishing spiritual journey.

Language: English

Pages: 306

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Anchor

Release: February 22, 2005

ISBN: 0385721277

ISBN 13: 9780385721271

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

Karen Armstrong

3.8/5 ( ratings)

In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness–diagnosed only years later as epilepsy–marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun. Gripping, revelatory, and inspirational, The Spiral Staircase is an extraordinary account of an astonishing spiritual journey.

Language: English

Pages: 306

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Anchor

Release: February 22, 2005

ISBN: 0385721277

ISBN 13: 9780385721271

More books from Karen Armstrong

A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

3.8/5 ( ratings)

Islam: A Short History

The Case for God

3.8/5 ( ratings)

The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Buddha

3.9/5 ( ratings)

A Short History of Myth

3.7/5 ( ratings)

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions

A Time to Keep Silence

3.9/5 ( ratings)

A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Nuns and Soldiers

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

3.8/5 ( ratings)

The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time

3.8/5 ( ratings)

The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World)

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Buddha

The Lost Art of Scripture

Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

Inside Islam: The Faith, the People and the Conflicts of the World's Fastest Growing Religion

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Rate this book!

Write a review?