The Great Transformation

Explores the origins of the world’s major faith traditions and argues that religion originally centered less on abstract belief and more on practices that transformed human character.

Full title: The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. The subject is the Axial Age, the few centuries in which Confucius, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, and the Greek philosophers appeared almost at once.

Karen Armstrong is a British historian of religion and a former Catholic religious sister, best known for A History of God.