The Case for God—which Britain’s The Daily Telegraph called Karen Armstrong’s “best, most lucid book to date”—“wraps a rebuke to the more militant sort of atheism,” according to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, “in an engaging survey of Western religious thought. …a former nun turned prolific popular historian, [she] wants to rescue the idea of God from its cultural despisers and its more literal-minded adherents alike.”
True, “she stands squarely on the side of ‘God,’” The Globe and Mail reports, “but the ‘God’ for which she has sympathy is not knowable, as we generally assume ‘God’ to be…. …The case being made in The Case for God is for mystery.”
In The Daily Telegraph, critic George Pitcher, referencing atheist Richard Dawkins and his The God Delusion—our last “Featured Book”—has it that she succeeds in “blow[ing] Dawkins away….” How? “…by demonstrating that religion is not what he and the atheist caravan think and claim that it is”; theirs is “an irrelevant argument…. For Armstrong…religion is like art—‘an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life.’” “…discover its wonderfully suggestive thinking for yourself,” The Globe and Mail urges.
The Case for God, by Karen Armstrong
Alfred A. Knopf, 2009
