Through The Narrow Gate [Import] [Hardcover]

Karen Armstrong (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 285 pages
• Publisher: Macmillan; First edition (1981)
• ISBN-10: 0333311361
• ISBN-13: 978-0333311363
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,048,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous other books on religious affairs-including A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha, and The Great Transformation-and two memoirs, Through the Narrow Gate and The Spiral Staircase. Her work has been translated into forty-five languages. She has addressed members of the U.S. Congress on three occasions; lectured to policy makers at the U.S. State Department; participated in the World Economic Forum in New York, Jordan, and Davos; addressed the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and New York; is increasingly invited to speak in Muslim countries; and is now an ambassador for the UN Alliance of Civilizations. In February 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and is currently working with TED on a major international project to launch and propagate a Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, to be signed in the fall of 2009 by a thousand religious and secular leaders. She lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

84 of 89 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rare glimpse into the shuttered world of the cloister, February 22, 2001

By 

Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery (Paperback)

Karen Armstrong entered a convent as a teenager in the 60's. While all the tumult of the sexual revolution, the Cold War, the Vietnam War seethed in the outside world, Karen was struggling with her difficult and almost medieval novitiate, her classes at Oxford, where her training as a nun conflicted with the scholastic world, and with her health. While Karen sought to cool the passions and desires of the world and become the perfect nun, her body rebelled and she suffered anorexia, fainting fits which were attributed to her emotions (but were diagnosed as epilepsy much later on.) Meanwhile, she achieved scholastic triumphs at Oxford, but at heavy price.

How Karen adjusts to live in the convent, and then to life at Oxford is an amazing story. Her autobiography is unsentimental and honest. This is a fascinating personal story as well as a rare look into a secret world that was forever altered by Vatican II and its reforms.

100 of 110 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An insider's look at a cloistered life, May 22, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery (Paperback)

....cloistered in a psychological as well as a physical sense.
Karen Armstrong, a woman of prodigious intellect and talent, a woman who has written seminal books on the subject of religion, goes inside her own personal experience as a cloistered nun in Through the Narrow Gate.
It's not a particularly pretty picture, this story of her seven years immersed in a life full of bleakness, medical neglect, sexual frustration, and mindless negation of intellect. For someone of Armstrong's mind-set, that last privation must have been hardest to bear. Outside the walls of the cloister, meanwhile, the chaos of the 60s was raging, making the life within more inexplicable - and ultimately, irrelevant.
There is one bright, kind, and encouraging Mother Superior, however, who provides the necessary window of light, a person who provides Armstrong with both a reason to stay and a reason to leave the convent.
It's a blessing for us that she did leave and go on to live her life as a scholar, teacher and author. It's almost an equal blessing, however, that she endured those 7 years and writes about it so poitnantly; it makes her presence in the world all the more valuable.

41 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspiring and Soul-Searching!, January 5, 2000

By 

Jennifer B. Barton "Beth Barton" (McKinney, Tx) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery (Paperback)

Through a Narrow Gate is a testament to the personal struggle between feeling the faith and wanting to somehow live it, too. I am impressed with her ability to relive the experience while being fair to both sides and making their decisions and feelings make sense, even when they are directly opposing. The most remarkable thing is her feelings about the modern convents given her struggle and her respect for what was. Her respect is contagious - she gave it to me! She, and her experiences, seem to ratify my own even as mine pale against her story. I recommend it to anyone seriously trying to understand God in their own lives and in their own terms.