Karen Armstrong The Spiral Staircase Sparknotes

Final Paper - The Spiral Staircase Karen Armstrong’s autobiography, The Spiral Staircase, is a compelling and unique story of a devout catholic’s fall from religion and discovery of faith. Armstrong’s difficult journey from the age of 17 and on allows for her controversial opinions and stances on God, religion, and the church to come to light. Her story acknowledges many issues of the Catholic church, people’s views of God, and organized religion. Many of Armstrong’s opinions come from her personal experience, but also from her identifying as a self-taught theologian, and she had dedicated a large chunk of her life to the research and understanding of the three Abrahamic religions. Today, Armstrong would not identify herself as a part of any specific religion, and would simply label herself a purely having faith, which is drastically different from her being a convent nun as a teenager. Her journey from this allowed her to find her place with God and also allowed for her to realize that she cannot have any experiences with God. Her journey and path are one of spiritual enlightenment. All of Armstrong’s ideas seem to spring from her fall from being a nun. At the age of seventeen to twenty-four, Armstrong was a convent nun for the Catholic church. Her time at the convent was riddled with issues for Armstrong, while undergoing the requirements to become a part of the convent, a rigorous and demanding feat, …show more content…
Right before taking this job, she had a particularly bad episode of fainting and blacking out, bad enough that in landed her in the hospital, and it was revealed that her problem from the past years had really been a form of epilepsy. Unexpectedly, Armstrong proudly claims, “I walked down Mortimer Street in a daze. For many people, I am sure, a diagnosis of epilepsy must be unwelcome news, but for me it was an occasion of pure happiness,” (Armstrong,