Book Review: THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (A Memoir) by Karen Armstrong

The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book cut me to the quick, in ways too profound to discuss at length here on social media, and will require a blog entry unto itself! But I simply can’t rave enough about my third Karen Armstrong book. And I suspect it will appeal to anyone (everyone?) who has been hurt or disillusioned by flawed humans in any organized religion.

I first heard of Karen Armstrong at the dinner table several years ago, when my dad would speak of her as the ex-nun who went on to write religious books that presented the true history of Christianity, without white-washing its messy, bloody past, as well as emphasizing Christianity’s commonalities with other major world religions.

I went on to read two of her books during my years as an Asian Civilization and World History high school teacher (“The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism” and “The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions”). These books gave me new appreciation for Protestant / Jewish/ Islamic fundamentalism (as an understandable reaction to the challenges of homogenizing modernity), as well as a renewed appreciation for the Axial Age of the 8th to 3rd century BCE (and yes, it’s Before Common Era and not BC = Before Christ, out of respect for the rest of the world that does not subscribe to Christianity). I remember being amazed at the idea that practically all philosophical traditions were born in this era! Confucianism and Taoism. Hinduism and Buddhism. The roots of the three Abrahamic faiths.

I remember thinking I was very lucky to teach in a nonsectarian school, where there was no Christian Living subject, but where Values/ GMRC was taught separately from discussing the world religions in the context of world history, not as theology. Having students from different faiths in the class made for rich discussions, and I believe we all benefited from realizing that there were several different ways to worship our Creator, and that there were more things that united our faiths than separated them.

This third Karen Armstrong book was vastly different in tone from the two others, being a memoir rather than an academic text. How can a former nun turned agnostic become a leading international figure in interfaith dialogue? This book recounts her amazing journey, from the nunnery, to Oxford, to her time as an English high school teacher, to her life-changing trip to Jerusalem. It reminded me a great deal of Thomas Merton’s “Seven Storey Mountain!” Except that while the latter made its readers run to seminaries, the former just might make would-be nuns re-think the “Get thee to a nunnery” inclination, ahaha.

I suppose this is why this book speaks to me enormously. Close friends know that 2019 was a difficult one (to put it mildly!!), causing many a cry unto heaven, many a dark night of the soul. And I only realized it when I was reading this book, encountering similar challenges, familiar struggles.
Karen Armstrong’s book makes us appreciate how God’s infinite nature cannot be confined within the walls of any religious institution. He is greater than human understanding, deeper than demagogic dogma.

Armstrong also reiterates her call for compassion to be put in practice:

“The one and only test of a valid religious idea…was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God’s name, it was bad theology.”

“If we cannot accommodate a viewpoint in a friend without resorting to unkindness, how can we hope to heal the terrible problems of our planet? I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant.

“Our task now is to mend our broken world; if religion cannot do that, it is worthless. And what our world needs now is not belief, not certainty, but compassionate action and practically expressed respect for the sacred value of all human beings, even our enemies.”

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!



View all my reviews