The Great Transformation>

Armstrong’s
New Book> 

Armstrong
review

Armstrong’s
buddhist sausage

Armstrong
discredits ‘Axial Age’

Armstrong’s
crypto-fundamentalism?

Gearing
up for the Armstrong mess

 More
on ‘Second’ Axial Age

More
‘Second Axial Age’ confusion

 Armstrong,
Axial Age, Aljazeera

No
Second Axial Age

Armstrong’s
Religious Revolution

 Armstrong
on Myth 

Voodoo
Scholarship    

More
on Armstrong’s Axial Age

Wallace’s
100 days

 Karen
Armstrong on Axial Age

 Second
Axial Age??

Armstrong’s
The Great Transformation

Here’s a review of
The Great Transformation : The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions
(Armstrong, Karen)
by Karen Armstrong

Mess of pottage , March 30, 2006
I found this distorted and superficial account of the Axial Age to be a big
disappointment, and I can only recommend Karl Jaspers’original text, along
with this reviewer’s World History and […]

03.28.06

Armstrong’s
New Book

 Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Great
Transformation, came out today and I have been reading it at high speed. First
impressions: what a hopeless mess, just as I feared and predicted on the basis
of her other book this year, The History of Myth. In fact, the latter book is
somewhat clearer on Armstrong’s views, […]

03.18.06

Armstrong
review

A Guardian review of Armstrong’s new book has some useful
criticism.
The eonic model, a generaliztion of the Axial Age concept, that ‘does it
right’, survives every one of these criticisms.
Please note that the establishment will publish Armstrong, and then critique
her. My version they will try to ignore, because then they would have to take
[…]

03.16.06

Armstrong’s
buddhist sausage

An interview with Armstrong in the Independent: now the
basis of religion is ‘compassion’. Doubtful. But I can see the PR
strategy. To find the common denominator for the ‘Axial Age religions’
takes a bit of doing. Something neutral and Dalai Lamaish like compassion
might do it. Buddha was compassionate, so was Mohammed. […]

03.13.06

Armstrong
discredits ‘Axial Age’

I have been waiting with a question mark in mind for the
appearance of Karen Armstrong’s book on the Axial Age, The Great
Transformation, reviewed here at the Financial Times (not yet available in the
US). Based on a previous account in her other book this year, A Short History
of Myth, her approach […]

03.02.06

Armstrong’s
crypto-fundamentalism?

By the time Armstong is done with the ‘Axial Age’ the
idea will be discredited.
Here’s one garbled version of Armstrong’s Second Axial Age thesis.

Having seen my book, no doubt, she has changed her tactics.
Fundamentalism and a second Axial Age starting in the twenty-first century is
complete nonsense.
Armstrong is not able to focus on what […]

Gearing
up for the Armstrong mess

 I have been waiting for Karen
Armstrong’s new book The Great Transformation on the Axial Age. Based on her
previous remarks in earlier books, with a short version in The History of
Myth, the result is going to make a complete mess of the material on the Axial
Age. Since she has a ready public […]

02.27.06

More
on ‘Second’ Axial Age

have a previous post on Karen Armstrong’s notion of a
‘Second Axial Age’, a completely confused idea, see here. This was an
interview at Enlightenment magazine. A letter to the editor in the next issue
shows total confusion on the subject. Sit down and study the eonic effect, and
the eonic model, and the […]

02.16.06

More
‘Second Axial Age’ confusion

The confusion over the term ‘Axial Age’ has found a
successor in the idea of a Second Axial Age.
I recommend graduating from the idea of the ‘Axial Age’ to the total
phenomenon called the ‘Eonic Effect’.

However, because of Eurocentric confusions the wish to
consider the parallelism of the Axial Age proper a repeatable property, or
[…]

01.31.06

Armstrong,
Axial Age, Aljazeera

Karen Armstrong on Aljazeera.net announces her new book on
Axial Age. Life is not fair, someone who has made a complete bollocks of the
question of the Axial Age writes a book that will sell due to her reputation.

The Axial Age was not a religious age producing religions
but a complex evolutionary moment that transformed […]

No
Second Axial Age

I got an email from someone who had read an amazon review of
mine on Armstrong’s Battle For God. I had forgotten that I had reviewed it,
but went to look, see below.
Armstrong’s idea of a second Axial Age doesn’t quite add up, as I have
commented before on this blog, search ‘Axial Age’ in […]

12.15.05

Armstrong’s
Religious Revolution

What is Enlightenment? magazine, issue 31, has an article on
Karen Armstrong and the supposed
‘Second Axial Age’. There is a previous post here on this which includes
the full text. Armstrong on Axial Age

ARMSTRONG: At this moment in history, I believe that we need
a new spiritual revolution. We […]

12.11.05

Armstrong
on Myth

 A short review of Armstrong’s new book on mythology:
A Short History of Myth (Myths) by Karen Armstrong
This book suffers from a kind of double identity, as an outline of world
history, adapted to some publisher’s project to do with mythology. The
question of myth is a complicated one, and Armstrong’s manner of challenging
‘logos’ […]

11.30.05

Voodoo
Scholarship

    What is Enlightenment?
magazine, issue 31, has an article on Karen Armstrong and the supposed
‘Second Axial Age’. See post from a few days ago: Armstrong on Axial Age.
The context of the magazine in question raises a controversial point, just at
the precipice of New Age bedlam: these guru environments are not domains of
[…]

11.22.05

More
on Armstrong’s Axial Age

 Continuing the question of Karen
Armstrong on the Axial Age, previous post here, which you can read first.
Googling Karen Armstrong’s views on a so-called ‘Second Axial Age’ I
find a number of seminars on the subject, with this from a conference of the
Jesus Seminar. Who should we find present here but Eugenie Scott! […]

11.20.05

Wallace’s
100 days

FOR THE NEXT HUNDRED DAYS, until his manuscript reached
Down, Alfred Russel Wallace stood alone in the world as, in our time, Neil
Armstrong stood on the moon in 1969, and Charles A. Lindbergh sat, isolated in
the cabin of his tiny airplane over the vastness of the mid-Atlantic less than
a generation earlier. Wallace […]

Karen
Armstrong on Axial Age

What is Enlightenment? magazine, issue 31, has an article on
Karen Armstrong and the supposed ‘Second Axial Age’. Text is listed below,
after my commentary. This page updates a post from a few days ago, and is also
available at
A Second Axial Age?
The use of the term ‘Axial Age’ has suffered […]

11.17.05

Second
Axial Age??

What is Enlightenment? magazine, issue 31, has an article on
Karen Armstrong and the supposed ‘Second Axial Age’. Unfortunately it is
not online. The use of the term ‘Axial Age’ has suffered confusion, and
has degenerated in some accounts into a conception of an age that produced the
great religions. But that is […]