The Lost Art of Scripture

One of our best living writers on religion

Financial Times

'Karen Armstrong has written an amazingly wide-ranging book, showing that the world's religious texts can be a force for good today, rather than a cause of conflict. The scale of her knowledge never ceases to astonish'

John Barton, author of A History of the Bible

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

Alain De Botton

Karen Armstrong is a genius

A.N. Wilson

A triumph... Karen Armstrong is one of our great commentators on the sacred. In this book she explores the sacred texts with a scholar’s eye and an illuminating clarity suggesting how much their wisdom and lasting power are still needed today

Salley Vickers

A remarkable book by a remarkable writer… the author’s mission is urgent in the light of the uses to which the world’s scriptures are sometimes put

Rev Dr Neil Richardson, Methodist Recorder

The Lost Art of Scripture… exhibits [Armstrong’s] well-known and admired characteristics as a writer: an ability to be both authoritative on all the major faiths…a reasoned insistence that religion today is misunderstood, as much by the religious as by their critics; and a passionate appeal to our fractious and fractured world to embrace religion’s core message…compassion and respect for others

Peter Stanford, Sunday Times

Exhilarating, challenging and curiously comforting… [The Lost Art of Scripture has] been written not only with intellectual rigour and an accessible turn of phrase, but also with love

Lucy Winkett, Prospect

Rich and wide-ranging… [The Lost Art of Scripture] makes a fascinating read… a treasure chest of social and religious history. Armstrong’s lucid prose makes her many-stranded story remarkably straightforward to follow… a learned and stimulating book

Teresa Morgan, Tablet

[The Lost Art of Scripture] takes us on a glorious journey… Armstrong is the most articulate and generous-hearted exegete of religion writing in English at the present time

AN Wilson, New Statesman

A fascinating excursion into neo-Gnosticism… Armstrong…has clearly done an enormous amount of reading and research to handle so skilfully the mass of material she surveys

Jack Carrigan, Catholic Herald

[Armstrong] weaves…[a] truly vast history into a coherent and fascinating narrative… an interesting and very well-written book

Gavin Flood, Church Times

Magisterial ... a dazzling accomplishment, a reflection of an encyclopaedic knowledge of comparative religion and of a wisdom about spirituality in the human species

New York Times Book Review

An epic story with a polemical edge… [a] lucid account of the evolution of sacred text… The Lost Art of Scripture is an impressive achievement, presenting a wide sweep of global religious history in little more than five hundred pages… Armstrong is…an accomplished and fluent writer

Literary Review