Sacred Nature

'KAREN ARMSTRONG IS A GENIUS' A.N. Wilson

'One of our best living writers on religion' Financial Times
'Karen Armstrong is one of the handful of wise and supremely intelligent commentators on religion' Alain De Botton

Karen Armstrong has a global authority and a superb track record as a writer on world religions and spirituality. In spirit and style Sacred Nature will be closest to two of her earlier books, Twelve Steps To A Compassionate Life and A Short History Of Myth. In that short, accessible and exciting form this will easily be Karen's most commercial book since Twelve Steps.

What Karen describes is how for most of human history nature was held to be sacred, and that our god or gods were believed present everywhere in nature. That was true of almost all traditions, both indigenous cultures and formal religions. So separating god and nature was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom and experience, but is also the root of how we have come to plunder the natural world and to promote the self in unhealthy ways.

Sacred Nature can be thought of as a book about 'deep ecology', about the most profound connections between man and nature, why and how we have revered it in all our cultures, and how we lost our way. It will conclude with a programme to help readers develop a different mindset that helps us reconnect nature and our sense of the sacred. It is a truly original and satisfying reappraisal of our relationship with the natural world.