DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

The Case for God

What religion really means

Karen Armstrong author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:1st Jul '10

Should be back in stock very soon

The Case for God cover

An essential book for our times: a thoughtful, cultured response to Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists.

Tracing the history of faith from the Palaeolithic Age to the present, the author shows that meaning of words such as 'belief', 'faith', and 'mystery' has been entirely altered, so that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God - and, indeed, reason itself - in a way that our ancestors would have found astonishing.

There is widespread confusion about the nature of religious truth. For the first time in history, a significantly large number of people want nothing to do with God. Militant atheists preach a gospel of godlessness with the zeal of missionaries and find an eager audience.

Tracing the history of faith from the Palaeolithic Age to the present, Karen Armstrong shows that meaning of words such as 'belief', 'faith', and 'mystery' has been entirely altered, so that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God - and, indeed, reason itself - in a way that our ancestors would have found astonishing.

Does God have a future? Karen Armstrong examines how we can build a faith that speaks to the needs of our troubled and dangerously polarised world.

One of our best living writers on religion...prodigiously sourced, passionately written * Financial Times *
A journey through religion that helps us to rescue what remains wise from so much that to many in Britain today no longer seems true... Armstrong is one of the the handful of wise and supremely intelligent commentators on religion -- Alain de Botton * Observer *
A tour de force of learning. A hefty history of theology, philosophy and science, and how they converge, it knocks Dawkins and Hitchens into an intellectual cocked hat...Armstrong rejoices in the unknowableness of life and searches, logically enough for meaning therein * Sunday Herald *
It isn't an easy read - why should it be? - but she is wonderfully clear and insightful - and not out to convert anyone * Daily Mail *
Dense and brilliant, chastening and consoling. Whether or not it sells as well as the latest Hitchens or Dawkins will be a measure of us, not the book * Sunday Times *

ISBN: 9780099524038

Dimensions: 198mm x 130mm x 23mm

Weight: 267g

384 pages