Flagship book festival . Nice, like to see that. Welcome b welcome back. And how many of you have attended one of those, National Book festival presents . Good, thank you, we like you so much. Well, welcome to the library of congresss National Book festival presents, a vibrant new series of programs inspired by the National Book festival and meant to bring you into the heart of this historic dynamic institution, the library of congress, your national library. This is a brand new effort through which we hope to spark conversations, engauge, inspire and entertain you with some of the most perverse, provocative writers of the day. In every program that we put before you, say from the childrens writer dave pilkey to a conversation with a haitian, wonderful literary novelist, to the program youve come to hear tonight, we mean to connect the works of living writers to a larger history, a deeper understanding. We delight in makes those connections for you and we delight in provoking the kind of exchanges that make all of us more informed and mindful citizens. Youre part of that collective mission by being here tonight. Thank you for joining us and thank you for helping us carry this torch. I hope youve taken a home town to take a look at the display of religious texts, the curator put out for you next door and perhaps youve taken a tour of some of the librarys vast holdings that will make tonights conversations come alive for you. So we tried to incorporate these features in every program and we want you to experience the depth and breadth of this library, of your library, but to cut to the task at hand, im thrilled to be standing here to introduce one of the worlds great minds on spiritual studies, a writer and scholar who helped contribute richly to our understanding of faith, scripture and the history of rereligions around the globe. Shes karen armstrong, United States alliance of civilizations and the event you dont know what that alliance is, its a dedicated and ambitious body that mounts actions, internationally against any form of extremism. Karen armstrong would like to make the world talk to one another. Its an alliance that nutures communication and strives to diffuse tensions for those who protest different faith. Shes one of the forces for charter of compassion, a campaign that she began about ten years ago, after she won the prize. The charter for compassion is a publicly created document in more than 30 languages that urges the peoples and religions of the world to embrace compassion, so fundamental to many of the worlds poor belief no matter what your religion. Karen armstrong began her career as a religious sister, a member of the Roman Catholic sisters of the holy child in england, from which she separated when she enrolled in studies in st. Anns college in oxford to study english literature. She has been a teacher, a writer, a Television Personality on relation issues, always and above all, she has been an explainer, a connector. The lesson throughout in her new book, the lost art of scripture is that the worlds major faith and religions have more in common than you might think. The differences over which wars have been fought and the heart hatreds that have been made harder are, if you study the scripture, are actually very few and surmountable. Its a hopeful message. Karen armstrong is the author of the best selling history of god. She has given up consistently brilliant, deeply researched and thoughtful work, wrong them through the narrow gates, tongues of fire, holy war about the crusades, buddha, faith after 11 september, and my own favorite, gripping memoir the spiral staircase, my climb out of darkness and now this important work the lost scripture where faith resides in our brains and our hearts. It is, in sort, an examination of the way sacred texts have been coopted by hardliners who sin insist they should be taken at their word when she ar dwus so well, sacred text are works of art. Roads to a higher consciousness, they were never meant to be rigid and unbending, written in stone. Shes here to tell us about this clarifying work of history in a time of intolerance and mutual income hence, her voice is at once, a comfort and a clarion call. At the end of her talk, we will take your questions, i hope you will formulate them, as she speaks to you. Please help me welcome, the prodigiously talented writer and thinker, karen armstrong. [applaus [applause] thats a wonderful welcome. Thank you. Oh. So, why is scripture a lost art . Well, first of all lets think if youre reading a book like pride and prejudice, youre not astonished or even dismayed to hear that mr. Darcy or mr. Bingley never existed. [inaudible] were reading scripture in a very factual way. Were with factual people in the early modern period, we started turning, in europe and over here in the United States, towards reason, logic, enlightenment, all of these things, science particularly have done wonderful things for the world, but its no good reading scripture or say the stories of scripture as though they were factual, any more than bride and prejudice is, before about the 18th century, it was impossible to write history as we know it today. Because its only since the 18th century where we started to learn about ancient cultures, we learned to develop the science of archeology and learned how to decipher ancient languages as if we could recreate the world of the past. As human beings, as perhaps the older members of the audience will agree with me, its more natural for us to forget, rather than to remember. [laughter] and scripture tells us what we should remember, and it does so in a way that brings out the reasons why we should remember these texts and the stories of scriptures, what they mean rather than what actually happened. Now ive got only a few minutes to talk and its quite a fat book as you see. So i thought i would focus on just three things about whats, how we misinterpret scriptures, the lost art. The quran means recitation, and muslims dont read the text as we do even when their learning it by heart they dont learn it from the text. Its recited to them and they learned that way. As a catholic child i the gregorian chant and the whole cadences of that chant. But we never read the bible much. Much. It was always done in the setting of music and also acted out. Because we learn things are more with our bodies than with our minds. We learn more about human nature and the world through movement and gesture. Im told people, if some of his talk and use a lot of gestures people will believe the gesture rather than the words. Because the body doesnt lie so much. But im going to take three different things, and the first one is that scripture tells us what we must believe, that it gives us truth, that we must accept. Its a very odd idea. It came in rather late, roundabout the time of the protestant reformation. And you remember that it was said famously that a poor man armed with scripture can learn as much about the faith that any hope or bishop. Give everybody the bible and they will be fine. Well, that didnt work because as a reformer soon found, they couldnt agree with one another about what scripture said, even on absolutely fundamental matters like the eucharist. It was so disturbing that from the beginning the Protestant Movement was split. Scripture is full of it is not teaching us anything. How can it, because it is talking about reality, we call it god over here, in india they called it the and that means the all or it is everything that is. Its reality itself. You cant define it, a word which literally means from the latin root, to set limits upon something. You cant limit god. As a catholic child at the age of eight, i learned my catechism. One of the questions was what is god . And in a single sentence we had him some up. God is the supreme spirit who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections. Well at eight i have to say that left me rather cold. I now think its quite entirely incorrect. Come because it takes, first of all it takes it for granted you can simply draw a a breath and define a word, as i said that means to set limits upon a reality that is in illimitable, that cannot be grasped. And for the more who alone exists of himself Thomas Aquinas before the modern. Probably summed up european thought in his great feel logic said god is not one of the things that exists. All things that we know exist are very temporary. They come and they go. They fail. They are feeble. God is being itself. That force of life. And it is certainly not a he. It tells you nothing about god, and neither does the bible. We fully got a little while. I just want to take one scripture that you probably, many of you will know, the book of genesis. In chapter one one the famous chapter one, we have a portrait of god. Everything a god should be. There he is in total control, and totally powerful. Simply has to speak and it comes into being. Unlike other Creation Stories which the bible also includes, god doesnt have to fight any terrible monsters, sea monsters in order creation is no great struggle for him and he speaks and it is done. And god is totally good and fair. At the end of every day he is very benign. He blesses everything that he has made and says it is good. Even his old enemy the sea monster that in other stories he is supposed to have destroyed, he blesses him and the two are made peaceful. Now, the rest of the book of genesis systematically undercuts that nice picture of god. [laughing] by the end of chapter three, the god who is in total control of his creation, has lost control. Cant manage them all, human beings, they are on their own. The god who was so benign becomes a cruel destroyer in the time of the flood. In the fit of what we can only call peak, he decides to destroy the whole human race. He say no and his family, wonders why assumes no a get out of the art he gets a drunk and commits at some horrible sexual act. But he wipes out the entire world so much for the benign god. And the god who is completely impartial in chapter one, lessing all that he has made, has monstrous favorites here he is endlessly choosing one person after another, for no good reason as far as we can see. Cain and abel, kane comes embraces sacrifice. God says no. He takes abels sacrifice. No reason at all. When hebrew tells us that his face crumples like a face of a child when it is shocked by something, and youre the first murder when he kills his brother, abel. When he goes on as god does, he chooses jacob rather than the soul, the older twin. You are made to feel the pain of the rejected one. Have you no blessing for me, father . He cries in despair. Father bless me, too. I cannot do it. And hagar just dumped in the desert with her baby son by abraham and gods command to face almost certain death. This is not the benign god we think. And at the end of the book of genesis, god was continually biting it and intervening and appearing at advising, disappears from the world. And joseph and his brothers have to struggle with their own insights and dreams, just as we do. And that image of god has been steadily undercut because this is the world that we know. This is a world where people do die in terrible, senseless disasters, natural disasters. This this is a world that is not fair. None of those people that he is chosen is particularly good or better than the other, and yet they are the ones that prosper and get the blessing, and that is what we see always. We are left at the end wondering what is this god . And notice when later on moses meets god in the burning bush and says what is your name . Because to know the name of someone gives you power over them. God says, in hebrew, i am what i am. Thats been translated to say god is saying his self subsistence being. But this is their early hebrew and it didnt have that kind of metaphysical thought in those they had developed a metaphysical tradition. Its the phrase used in hebrew of deliberate vagueness, but when you say, the bible will say they went where they went. It means i dont know where they went. [laughing] what god is saying is basically mind your own business. Dont ask me. And similarly he chooses moses to speak for him pick moses says to them look, god, why are you choosing the . Ever sense a child ive had this terrible speech impediment and no one can hear a word i say. And god says never mind, arab will speak for you, your brother was big for you. So were only getting what god has said to moses is secondhand and you wonder really how much moses has understood. And furthermore, it is erin, the speaker who is guilty of idolatry, because its his idea that the israelites worship god in the form of a golden calf. Narrowing god down to a single image, and moses, he still prefers moses who cannot speak because god is unspeakable. And the scripture begins the tao that can remain is not the eternal tao. You can say what god you can say what the hell is. That is not the tao. If you can see what it is, its like in the catholic catechism. Thats not god at all. And so heaven does not speak of confucius, of the highest reality in confucianism. Heaven does not speak. We just get glimpses of what we can see. In one of the taoist scriptures, confucius nephew is supposed to say i sit quietly and forget. I forget everything ive been told. Not building up all this knowledge about god. So scripture is not telling us what we should believe. It is rather opening our minds and hearts to the fact that what, we speak about god we do not know what were talking about. Its the dao that can be name is that the eternal dao. Very early in the tenth century, the priests of india, ancient india, used to have competition and they would go off into the wilderness and they would fast and pray and then they would come together. The indians loved competitions. The object of it was to find a word that some of what i mentioned earlier, the all, everything that is. The first priest, the challenger, drawing on all these huge learning and his mystical experience would come out with a phrase that he thought, what summed up the all pure and the of priests would have to reply, build upon that and reply. But the priest who won the competition was the one who reduced them all to silence. And in that silence, he was present. The brahman was not present in the learned declarations, but in the sudden realization of the impotence of speech when you face the divine. And so when we go, why did we have catechisms in the first place . Because after the reformists found they couldnt agree themselves upon scripture, they said there was no thought of letting ordinary people read the bible anymore. That was clearly out, and so they had to have catechisms instead, both the catholic leaders and the protestants did this. So you have, so you would approach the scriptures through a set of catechism on theological answers devised by human beings like that, what is god, and not the model of scripture. One of indias favorite scriptures is a story, a terrible story of an appalling war. Its hard to see any light or glimmer of hope in it at all, even at the very end when they heroes all go to heaven. Its not clear it is a heaven at all actually. You are not left wondering whether heaven exists, and certainly left the input data t what the gods are up to and yet that is one of indias best love scriptures because instead of giving us answers, it plunges us into obscurity, get rid of your catechisms and oppose, let yourself see the ambiguity of scripture. Okay, point number two. Scripture does not expect us to go back to the original meaning of the text. In modern scholarship thats what we do, isnt it . We go back to like the earliest accounts of something or the earliest version of a story or something. Go back to the original text. Thats the protestants reformers wanted to do. They wanted to go back to the early church to reproduce the early church. Theres a problem about that because they were men and women of the early modern period, that the First Century of christianity. Its impossible for us to go back, especially as all the first christians were jews who had an entirely different view of scripture. We are still doing that today, and sometimes in very distorted forms. Youve got in saudi arabia, for example, the one hobbies who reproduce a lot of seventh century customs and mores. Going back to what the prophets have done at that time, but they are not meet the women of seventh century. There are even fundamentalists in this country who have suggested that they revive the old hebrew legislation which would include the selling of disobedient children. We are not programmed to do this. Scripture, in every scripture tradition that i studied, and i found this out i didnt know this at the beginning of my research. It insists that you move forward and apply it to the present. Invent it if you like. The jewish people, after they lost the temple which was destroyed by the romans in the year 70, could not read the old hebrew text in the same way. Because the whole of that spirituality centered around the temple and theres a terrible whole right in the heart of the scripture. But they didnt just chuck it out. They develop something called midrash, which means, comes from a verb which means to go in search of something. So you would take someone to come to one of the rapids and asking the question and if you would answer it by taking a verse from the book of psalms, say, what another first from one of the prophets and perhaps another from the book of genesis, text that have no relation to one another, one loop altogether and there you have an answer that answers this particular question. And so it was inventive, and there was this form, midrash was invented and affected by the great rabbi who died, he was killed by the romans in the early second century. There was a story told about him that same of his brilliance was so great that it reached heaven, and moses got to hear about this, and he was intrigued. He wanted to find out what was happening so he came down to earth and tended the rabbis scripture class and he sat in the back row among, at the very back. But found to his intense embarrassment that he couldnt understand a word of the torah that the rabbi was expounding. A torque that it been revealed to him on mount sinai. But instead of being missed about it he goes back to heaven shaking his head probably rather like a proud father saying my children have defeated me but they have grown up. It cant be on me. One rabbi put it this way. He said that every time that which was not revealed to moses was revealed to the rabbi and his generation. Scripture revelation was something that happened once in the distant past. It was present when ever a jewish student with his teacher confronted the sacred text and found something new in it. And in the early versions, there would be a page on which the student must imbibe his own thoughts, his own discoveries. He would be so imagine, he and his master were standing together on mount sinai with moses and taking the revelation further because revelation was that something had happened once in the past. It happened every time a jew confronted the sacred texts. And the new testament, the writers o