Karen Armstrong (b. 1944) is a British author who specializes in studies of comparative religion. Born in Worcestershire and raised Catholic, Armstrong began the process of becoming a nun in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus (SHCJ) at the age of 17. The SHCJ is a teaching order that was founded in 1846 in England by Pennsylvania native Cornelia Connelly. Today, SHCJ runs schools in the United States, England, Ghana, and Nigeria. Armstrong alleges that she experienced extreme psychological and physical abuse while in the care of the SHJC. These experiences were recorded in her memoir Through the Narrow Gate (1981), which was the first book she ever published. Eventually, the SHCJ permitted her to pursue studies at Oxford, enabling her to escape the abuse.

Following her traumatic experiences as a nun, Armstrong left organized religious life at age 24 and has since practiced a more personal form of spirituality. In 2006, she told the Washington Post, “Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves” (Quinn, Sally.