Yesterday I attended a lecture given by Karen Armstrong called "The Point of Religion," as part of the University of St Andrews 600 Lecture Series.
[Click here for a shorter version of my piece on Independent Catholic News.]
I had initially planned to leave early to attend a meeting, but after she mentioned the need to recognise our "impotence of speech" and "finding meaning in the silence," I thought it might be worth staying.
Introduced by the Principal as a voice on ecumenical understanding who wants to make religion accessible, I was interested to see exactly what her point would be on religion. She began with how we talk about God / Nirvana / Dao, saying that St Thomas Aquinas would disagree with the definition that God is a supreme being, and went on to talk about how all religious language is symbolic (analogy etc.).
Following from this she spoke about the need for something more than what life can offer, she called it a "transcendence". (I should have stressed that the lecture was very much on religion and not theology. She quoted the Qur'an, spoke about Buddhism, and even told a short story about Brahman to illustrate her point about silence.) She was saying that if people don't believe in God / transcendence, they end up looking for meaning elsewhere, like in sex, music, drugs etc. They yearn for this transcendence but look for it in all the wrong places.
[Click here for a shorter version of my piece on Independent Catholic News.]
I had initially planned to leave early to attend a meeting, but after she mentioned the need to recognise our "impotence of speech" and "finding meaning in the silence," I thought it might be worth staying.
Introduced by the Principal as a voice on ecumenical understanding who wants to make religion accessible, I was interested to see exactly what her point would be on religion. She began with how we talk about God / Nirvana / Dao, saying that St Thomas Aquinas would disagree with the definition that God is a supreme being, and went on to talk about how all religious language is symbolic (analogy etc.).
Following from this she spoke about the need for something more than what life can offer, she called it a "transcendence". (I should have stressed that the lecture was very much on religion and not theology. She quoted the Qur'an, spoke about Buddhism, and even told a short story about Brahman to illustrate her point about silence.) She was saying that if people don't believe in God / transcendence, they end up looking for meaning elsewhere, like in sex, music, drugs etc. They yearn for this transcendence but look for it in all the wrong places.