Karen Armstrong, Distinguished Speaker in the Humanities
 In
November Karen Armstrong spoke to a standing-room-only audience
of over 800 in the Emerson Suites. The timeliness of her talk,
"The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam," was apparent as students, faculty, and members of
community listened and questioned this expert on the world's religions.
She was the third visitor in the Distinguished Speaker in the
Humanities Series.
Armstrong is an exuberant speaker (once clocked at 130 words
a minute) who distills her information through a deeply lived
and informed background in spiritual work and studies. From Roman
Catholic nun (ages 17-24) to Oxford literature undergraduate to
documentary maker (Jerusalem) to, currently, teacher at London's
prestigious Leo Baeck College and historian (13 books, including
the New York Times best-seller A History of God),
she has earned a reputation as the most provocative, original,
and inclusive thinker on the role of religion in the modern world.
Students were fascinated. Laura Hayes '05 wrote
this summary (quoted text is from Armstrong's talk):
Karen Armstrong's presentation on Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam was extremely interesting. She began by stating what fundamentalism
was not. Fundamentalism is not simply religious conservatism,
it is not extremism, and it is not simply Muslim. The first
fundamentalists were actually the Christian Protestants in the
United States around the turn of the 19th century. Islam was
the last religion of the three to form fundamentalists.
Muslim fundamentalists are against modern Western secular society
and believe they have a battle with the rest of the world, "a
battle against modernity." Modernized nations have two qualities
that anger fundamentalists: independence and innovation. According
to Armstrong, there is no independence in the Muslim world and
dependence leads to imitation. Armstrong notes that it took
western Europe 300 years to invent modern conveniences, and
the Muslim world has had approximately 50 years to catch up,
so all they are doing or can do is imitate the Western world.
And in the Muslim nations, there are leaders who have been educated
in the Western world and the vast majority of the people who
have not --- and they have been left to "rot."
Fundamentalists believe that modern liberal secular societies
want "to knock out religion, destroy it." The acts of terror
on September 11, as Karen Armstrong put it, were the most extreme
fundamentalist attack ever waged. It was something never experienced
before, "somewhat post-fundamentalism." To conclude, Armstrong
said that the rest of the world must "decode" fundamentalist
imagery. We must do this because trying to ignore fundamentalism,
trying to suppress it, and trying to exploit it hasn't worked.
Acknowledging her own fear, she said, "We must try to understand
their fear."
Photo of Armstrong with Dean Erlich by Sheryl D.
Sinkow |
