Karen Armstrong: Steps to a Compassionate Life, Part 2

Oprah's Super Soul

Oprah

Society & Culture

4.6 • 33.1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 December 2018

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Former Catholic nun, world-renowned religious scholar and author, Karen Armstrong discusses her memoir, "The Spiral Staircase." Karen discusses the details of her fascinating spiritual journey, which began when she joined a convent at the age of 17. Hoping to forge a deep connection to God, her inspiration was met with harsh disillusionment. Karen says she was deeply unhappy as a nun and unable to pray. Seven years later, she left the convent feeling like a failure, with her future in question. Karen says she avoided all organized religion for more than a decade, but then returned to the subject years later as a writer and scholar after experiencing an "awakening" while on assignment in Jerusalem. In our “perilously divided world,” we need to live more compassionately now more than ever, she says. In her book "Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life," Karen outlines simple practices anyone can do in hopes of making a lifelong commitment to creating a more harmonious world. (Part 2 of 2)

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0:00.0	I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of
0:07.5	the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time, taking time to be more fully present.
0:16.1	Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right
0:23.1	now. Welcome to part two of our conversation.
0:27.4	This is how Karen Armstrong, our Super Soul Sunday guest today, has been described. She's
0:33.2	one of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world. And she's
0:38.8	arguably the most lucid, wide-ranging, and consistently interesting religion writer today.
0:46.9	Karen is a former Catholic nun who has studied the world's great religions and she's identified
0:53.4	the common thread that runs through all of them. And we talked about this once before and
0:58.9	that common thread is compassion, compassion.
1:03.7	It took years and years of studying and research for Karen to discover that common thread
1:09.9	and experience that began at the age of 17 when she decided to become a Catholic nun.
1:16.2	Last time we sat down together, Karen revealed her painful struggles behind convent walls.
1:21.2	Terrible loneliness, I think that was the hard thing because we're not allowed to make
1:25.3	friends.
1:26.3	You weren't even allowed to have friends because you're trying to get rid of ego and that
1:32.0	is a hard struggle.
1:34.2	Disillusion with life as a nun, Karen ultimately made the difficult decision to leave religious
1:39.8	life altogether, but her passion for studying the world's religions remained fierce.
1:45.8	And today she is one of the most acclaimed and prolific writers on the subject of faith.
1:52.0	It was in the aftermath of September 11th that Karen became a sought after expert having
1:56.8	written extensively on Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
	...

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