Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

From the bestselling author of The Case for God, a smart, passionate new volume that can help us make the world a more compassionate place.;In this extraordinarily important and thought-provoking new work, Karen Armstrong—one of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world—explains how to practice the religion of compassion that her last books have preached. Here, she sets out a program that can lead us toward a more compassionate life, showing us how we can work diligently to cultivate and expand our capacity for compassion. The twelve steps she suggests begin with “Learn About Compassion” and close with “Love Your Enemies.” In between, she takes up self-love, mindfulness, suffering, sympathetic joy, the limits of our knowledge of others, and “Concern for Everybody.” She suggests concrete ways of putting compassion into action in our daily lives. And throughout, she makes clear that a compassionate life is not a matter of only heart or mind but a deliberate and often life-altering commingling of the two.;Publication History: Knopf Harcover: January 2011