Karen Armstrong at The Chautauqua Institution
Healthy Liberal Christianity at Park Church ) Using “the depth and breadth of her historical, theological, and psychological understanding”, she explored the theme of “What is Religion?”
Summaries of all five talks are available at The Chautauqua Daily’s website.
Here is a brief look at what you will find:
June 25 paper (first lecture) – Karen discusses the distinction between faith and belief.
Today we are obsessed by orthodoxy, focusing on thinking the right things, especially in the Christian world. We think that revelation came down from heaven cast in stone. We think the ways we experience religion now are the same as we always did. It would seem that revelation should give us certitude but this has never been the case, Armstrong said.
June 26 paper (second lecture) – Karen speaks about silence, the limitations and difficulty of God-talk, the purpose of ritual and the rise of atheism.
“Our theology should reduce us to [a] kind of silent core.” ”Religious language should always point beyond the self into a silence that is productive with awe.”
June 27 paper (third lecture) – Karen focused on Jewish and Christian mysteries.
“It’s difficult for us to shed our yearning for certainty in the religion because we’re very opinionated in this society…We’re encourage to have strong opinions and to voice them. Ideas are fine but we also need a sense of unknowing and humility, specially when we come to speak about God”, she said.
June 28-29 paper (fourth lecture) – Karen examines the interactions between different faiths and the role of compassion.
The thing that was common in all of the monotheistic traditions was that the antidote to violence was compassion.
June 30 paper (fifth lecture) Karen delved deeper into her thoughts on compassion.
“You must take your benevolence where there’s no hope of any return,” she said. We have a choice: do we go with the God of revelation who is often seen with a sword in hand or with Jesus on the Mount who says love one another?
I appreciate your comments Karen. One point to add, in regards to lecture 5, if you read the Revelation closely the sword of God is almost always coming from His mouth, pointing us back to the words of Jesus. Also, the key image of the Revelation is that the Lion of Judah is a slain Lamb (Chapter 5) showing that the way of victory over evil is by sacrificial love and compassion, even to the point of death.