Sacred Nature
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  • Published: 30 June 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529194913
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $19.99

Sacred Nature

The Recovery of Integrity

Formats & editions
Paperback
17 Oct 2023
Tr. Paperback
5 Jul 2022
Hardback
30 Jul 2022
EBook
30 Jun 2022
Audiobook
30 Jun 2022
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An urgent manifesto and a practical guide on how to change our relationship with nature, by one of the world's leading writers on religion and spirituality

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

For most of human history nature was held to be sacred, and our God or gods were believed to be present everywhere in nature. That was true of almost all the world's cultures and religious traditions. When people in the West began to separate God and nature in the seventeenth century, it was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom and experience: it was also the root of how we have come to plunder the natural world and to promote our individual selves in unhealthy and destructive ways.

Karen Armstrong argues that if we want to avert the looming environmental catastrophe, it is not enough to change our behaviour: we need to learn to think and feel differently about the natural world. She passionately believes that our religious heritage can teach us how to recover a spiritual bond with nature. Each of the book's ten chapters concentrates on a theme that has been central to the world's religious traditions - from gratitude and compassion to sacrifice and non-violence - and offers practical steps to help us develop a different mindset to reconnect with nature and rekindle our sense of the sacred.

Sacred Nature is a book about 'deep ecology': it is about the most profound connections between humans and the natural world. It speaks to anyone interested in our relationship with the natural world, worried about the destruction of our environment, and searching for new ways of thinking to accompany the political action needed to save our planet.

'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
  • Published: 30 June 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529194913
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $19.99
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About the author

Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong is one of the world's leading commentators on religious affairs. She spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun, but left her teaching order in 1969 to read English at St Anne's College, Oxford. In 1982, she became a full time writer and broadcaster. She is a best-selling author of over 16 books. A passionate campaigner for religious liberty, Armstrong has addressed members of the United States Congress and participated in the World Economic Forum. In 2013 she recieved the British Academy's inaugural Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for improving transcultural understanding.

portrait photo of Karen Armstrong

Also by Karen Armstrong

Religion
The Lost Art of Scripture
Fields of Blood
In the Beginning
Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
The Case for God
Visions Of God
See all

Praise for Sacred Nature

Warm and witty ... [Armstrong's] ability to summon up examples and quotations...is humbling... Sacred Nature [is] a challenge to think differently in the face of climate change, to recover ways of looking at things, including God

Tablet

A rich and subtle exploration of the sacredness of nature, filled with a timeless wisdom and deep humanity ... Much has been written on the scientific and technological aspects of climate change ... But Armstrong's book is both more personal and more profound. Its urgent message is that hearts and minds need to change if we are to once more learn to revere our beautiful and fragile planet

Guardian, Book of the Day

An accessible account of how a wider religious perspective might contribute to humans' adopting a more solicitous attitude to nature

Rowan Williams, New Statesman

This is a beautiful book, very well written and very inspiring for religious believers and those who do not share such religious faith. But it is much more than that: it presents and defends a thesis which the author puts at the centre of a program to restore the lost harmony with nature

Reviews in Science, Religion and Theology

Sacred Nature... is a spiritual time capsule of the post-Christian soul in crisis, a lamentation in the key of Greta Thunberg, with undertones of Carl Jung

Wall Street Journal

Karen Armstrong is one of the handful of wise and supremely intelligent commentators on religion

Alain de Botton

A passionate book ... We must change our understanding of nature, this puzzling category we find outselves at liberty to exploit. Happily, there are resources in many religious traditions that can help us

Times Literary Supplement