Sacred Nature

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

'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 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

  • 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

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

  • 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

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

    New Statesman

  • 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

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