Sacred Nature

How We Can Recover Our Bond with the Natural World

By: Karen Armstrong

Narrated by: Karen Armstrong

Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

For most of human history nature was held to be sacred and our God or gods were believed to be present everywhere in nature. That was true of almost all the world's cultures and religious traditions. When people in the West began to separate God and nature in the 17th century, it was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom and experience: it was also the root of how we have come to plunder the natural world and to promote our individual selves in unhealthy and destructive ways.

Karen Armstrong argues that if we want to avert the looming environmental catastrophe, it is not enough to change our behaviour: we need to learn to think and feel differently about the natural world. She passionately believes that our religious heritage can teach us how to recover a spiritual bond with nature. Each of the book's 10 chapters concentrates on a theme that has been central to the world's religious traditions—from gratitude and compassion to sacrifice and non-violence—and offers practical steps to help us develop a different mindset to reconnect with nature and rekindle our sense of the sacred.

Sacred Nature is a book about 'deep ecology': it is about the most profound connections between humans and the natural world. It speaks to anyone interested in our relationship with the natural world, worried about the destruction of our environment and searching for new ways of thinking to accompany the political action needed to save our planet.

©2022 Karen Armstrong (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Karen Armstrong is a genius." (A.N. Wilson)