Karen Armstrong

Armstrong’s biographies and “Great Transformation” narratives irritated specialists who wanted footnote torque—and guided general readers toward the Axial Age’s ethical intensification without demanding confessional assent. Her Charter for Compassion translated scholarly allergy to cruelty into civic idiom.

Critics argue she flattens difference in favor of benevolent convergence; defenders note she consistently targets literalist violence—secular and religious—with the same stubborn energy.

Outdeus enlists Armstrong as a modern interlocutor alongside Dennett and James: pluralism as habit, myth as truth-bearing practice, secular modernity as context requiring new forms of attention to older disciplines of empathy.