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915171c
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The Taliban's discrimination against women is completely opposed to the practice of the Prophet and the conduct of the first ummah. The Taliban are typically fundamentalist, however, in their highly selective vision of religion (which reflects their narrow education in some of the madrasahs of Pakistan), which perverts the faith and turns it in the opposite direction of what was intended. Like all the major faiths, Muslim fundamentalists, i..
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Karen Armstrong |
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ae8c7d7
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It is always tempting to try to shut out the suffering that is an inescapable part of the human condition, but once it has broken through the cautionary barricades we have erected against it, we can never see the world in the same way again.
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Karen Armstrong |
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a315aab
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We have seen that, like the weather, religion "does lots of different things." To claim that it has a single, unchanging, and inherently violent essence is not accurate. Identical religious beliefs and practices have inspired diametrically opposed courses of action."
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Karen Armstrong |
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7498e6b
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Every single one of the major traditions--Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms--teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others.
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Karen Armstrong |
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72c104d
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By increasing the amount of Torah (obligatory religious laws) in the world, they were extending His presence in the world and making it more effective.
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empowerment
law
rights
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Karen Armstrong |
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7b6548a
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Wordsworth had discerned a 'spirit' which was at one and the same time immanent in and distinct from natural phenomena: 'A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all th..
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Karen Armstrong |
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504491a
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Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.
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Karen Armstrong |
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3ce315a
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Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality.
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Karen Armstrong |
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a9f5f29
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Some Western Christians read the story as a factual account of the Original Sin that condemned the human race to everlasting perdition. But this is a peculiarly Western Christian interpretation and was introduced controversially by Saint Augustine of Hippo only in the early fifth century. The Eden story has never been understood in this way in either the Jewish or the Orthodox Christian traditions. However, we all tend to see these ancient ..
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Karen Armstrong |
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581d144
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For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a 'misfiring of something useful', it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive.
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religion
scientific-naturalism
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Karen Armstrong |
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232bd2b
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As an inspiration for terrorism, however, nationalism has been far more productive than religion. Terrorism experts agree that the denial of a people's right to national self-determination and the occupation of its homeland by foreign forces has historically been the most powerful recruiting agent of terrorist organizations, whether their ideology is religious (the Lebanese Shii) or secular (the PLO).
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Karen Armstrong |
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45d66cb
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Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives - they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.
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Karen Armstrong |
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0f2a5a7
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Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western people at least, to be morally superior,' says British psychologist Jacqueline Rose. 'Why dying with your victim should be seen as a greater sin than saving yourself is unclear.'The colonial West had created a two-tier hierarchy that privileged itself at the expense of 'The Rest'. The Enlightenment had preached the equality of all human beings, ..
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religion
neo-colonialism
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Karen Armstrong |
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6c68c95
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Fundamentalism therefore reveals a fissure in society, which is polarized between those who enjoy secular culture and those who regard it with dread. As time passes, the two camps become increasingly unable to understand one another. Fundamentalism thus begins as an internal dispute, with liberalizers or secularists within one's own culture or nation. In the first instance, for example, Muslim fundamentalists will often oppose their fellow ..
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Karen Armstrong |
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8326c50
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We routinely and rightly condemn the terrorism that kills civilians in the name of God but we cannot claim the high moral ground if we dismiss the suffering and death of the many thousands of civilians who die in our wars as 'collateral damage'. Ancient religious mythologies helped people to face up to the dilemma of state violence, but our current nationalist ideologies seem by contrast to promote a retreat into denial or hardening of our ..
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terrorism
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Karen Armstrong |
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a23a0f5
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A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed.
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Karen Armstrong |
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e0d4d34
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A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.
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Karen Armstrong |
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2215c98
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Of all the great world religions, Christianity should value the body most. After all, it taught that God had in some sense taken a human body and used it to redeem the world; everything about the physical should have been sacred and sacramental. But that had not happened. instead, the churches had found it almost impossible to integrate the sexual with the divine and had developed a Platonic aversion to the body - particularly the bodies of..
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human-body
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Karen Armstrong |
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fd1eedd
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We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.
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Karen Armstrong |
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20bba1b
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each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.
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Karen Armstrong |
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fdb20a6
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Then, as now, there would always be people who preferred the option of devoting their religious energies to sacred space over the more difficult duty of compassion.
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religion
sacred-space
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Karen Armstrong |
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7080698
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One of the characteristics of early modern thought was a tendency to assume binary contrasts. In an attempt to define phenomena more exactly, categories of experience that had once co-inhered were now set off against each other: faith and reason, intellect and emotion, and church and state.
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Karen Armstrong |
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a781a60
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It is not true that Islam makes it impossible for Muslims to create a modern secular society, as Westerners sometimes imagine. But it is true that secularization has been very different in the Muslim world. In the West, it has usually been experienced as benign. In the early days, it was conceived by such philosophers as John Locke (1632-1704) as a new and better way of being religious, since it freed religion from coercive state control an..
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Karen Armstrong |
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In a conservative society, stability and order were far more important than freedom of expression.
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Karen Armstrong |
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68824c6
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lm ykn lTqs "lTqws ldyny@" fy l`lm qbl lHdyth ntj 'fkr dyny@ bl `l~ lnqyD fqd knt l'fkr ntj lTqws"
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Karen Armstrong |
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1179f39
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Skeletal remains show that plant-fed humans were a head shorter than meat-eating hunters, prone to anemia, infectious diseases, rotten teeth, and bone disorders.
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Karen Armstrong |
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8f544af
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Moses explained, "the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place."1 In his classic study of religion and violence, Rene Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries among groups within the community.2"
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Karen Armstrong |
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53de9a0
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Oedipus had to abandon his certainty, his clarity, and supposed insight in order to become aware of the dark ambiguity of the human condition.
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Karen Armstrong |
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ccf71cb
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The Qur'an was attempting to give women a legal status that most Western women would not enjoy until the nineteenth century. The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet's heart, but it was resolutely opposed by many men in the ummah, including some of his closest companions.
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Karen Armstrong |
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835b1a8
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Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence. They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the perennial philosophy, so called because it..
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Karen Armstrong |
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aa4957b
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Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius, it is unlikely that we will save our planet. A purely rational education will not suffice.
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spirituality
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Karen Armstrong |
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f970338
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When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they probably did not fall into a state of original sin, as Saint Augustine believed, but into an agrarian economy.
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Karen Armstrong |
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e980e0c
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We are meaning-seeking creatures.
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Karen Armstrong |
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1bb34d4
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Later American support for the unpopular Muhammad Reza Shah, who not only closed down the Majlis to effect his modernization programme, but systematically denied Iranians fundamental human rights that democracy was supposed to guarantee, made it seem that there was a double standard. The West proudly proclaimed democracy for its own people, but Muslims were expected to submit to cruel dictatorships. In Egypt there were seventeen general ele..
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Karen Armstrong |
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e9adeca
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Paul had been doing his best to hasten the coming of the Messiah; that was the "good" that he was trying to do. But in an overwhelming moment of truth, he realized that Jesus's followers were absolutely right and that his persecution of their community had actually impeded the arrival of the Messianic Age. As if this were not enough, his violence had broken the fundamental principles of the Torah: love of God and love of neighbor. In his ex..
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Karen Armstrong |
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57e08b9
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As we develop our compassionate mind, we should feel an increasing sense of responsibility for the suffering of others and form a resolve to do everything we can to free them from their pain.
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Karen Armstrong |
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483af44
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Anybody who imagines that revealed religion requires a craven clinging to a fixed, unalterable, and self-evident truth should read the rabbis. Midrash required them to "investigate" and "go in search" of fresh insight. The rabbis used the old scriptures not to retreat into the past but to propel them into the uncertainties of the post-temple world."
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Karen Armstrong |
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d71116d
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The new Sufi tariqahs founded at this time stressed the unlimited potential of human life. Sufis could experience on the spiritual plane what the Mongols had so nearly achieved in terrestrial politics
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Karen Armstrong |
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244f971
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The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine.
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Karen Armstrong |
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27f637b
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My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I
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Karen Armstrong |
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a2c4f93
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Compassion dervies from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning "to suffer, undergo or experience." So "compassion" means "to endure [something] with another person," to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into his point of view. That is why our hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybo..
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compassion
inspirational
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Karen Armstrong |
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0a91b7a
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Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic and French, however, grammatical gender gives theological discourse a sort of sexual counterpoint and dialectic, which provides a balance that is often lacking in English. Thus in Arabic al-Lah (the supreme name for God) is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God--al-Dh..
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Karen Armstrong |
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ecbcd88
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In each of the early surahs, God spoke intimately to the individual, often preferring to pose many of his teachings in the form of a question - 'Have you not heard?' 'Do you consider?' 'Have you not seen?'. Each listener was thus invited to interrogate him or herself. Any response to these queries was usually grammatically ambiguous or indefinite, leaving the audience with an image on which to meditate but with no decisive answer. This new ..
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quran
meditation
reflection
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Karen Armstrong |
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ffc9358
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Every year there was an important poetry contest at the fair of 'Ukaz, just outside Mecca, and the winning poems were embroidered in gold on fine black cloth and hung on the walls of the Kabah. Muhammad's followers would, therefore, have been able to pick up verbal signals in the text that are lost in translation. They found that themes, words, phrases, and sound patterns recurred again and again--like the variations in a piece of music, wh..
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Karen Armstrong |