Karen Armstrong is on a rather estimable rescue mission: to restore the world's great sacred testaments to their original purpose. These writings, she argues in her new book "The Lost Art of Scripture," have become proof texts in battles of intellectual certainty, rather than portals into transcendence.
"Religion — like painting, music or poetry — is an art form," said Armstrong, the former nun whose own writings have investigated, exposed and defended the meaning of religion.
It is not intended to compete with the sciences, she contends. Quite the opposite, religion goes deeper than the testable world can ever reach.
"If we rely on reason alone, life seems pointless," she said by phone from her London home. "Religion, like art, helps us to assuage this lack of meaning and it does so not by rational arguments but by reaching our emotions and the deeper parts of our unconscious minds."
A prophet for a new understanding of religion and religious practice, Armstrong brings her cause to the Fitzgerald Theater Nov. 7 as part of the Talking Volumes literary series.
In "The Lost Art of Scripture," she wends her way through the scriptural histories of Western monotheism and Eastern disciplines and comes to the conclusion that we need to read these books in a new way.
"Lost Art" joins her rather amazing body of work — which includes "A History of God," "Faith After 11 September" and "Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence," which brought her to Talking Volumes in 2015.
Armstrong's greatest strength in her dozen or so books is an intellectual ferocity and a cool distance from her subjects. She isn't here to prove a point. Her indefatigable research yields simple yet profound conclusions that stimulate the mind, even as her target aims deeper into the human psyche.