Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator best known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister who left the convent in 1969, she writes about the shared ground of the major faiths, such as compassion and the Golden Rule. Her titles include A History of God, which traces the 4,000-year quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and Bible, a study of how the text took shape and how readers have understood it. In February 2008 she received the US$100,000 TED Prize and used the occasion to call for a Charter for Compassion, which was unveiled the following year.
