Karen Armstrong, "Does God Have a Future?"

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:

1. Armstrong's title poses a question: Does God have a future? A more conventional writer might answer that question with a "Yes" or a "No," supported by a series of arguments. But Armstrong does something else, demonstrating an approach some readers might find unexpected in the context of a "philosophical" issue. How would you characterize this approach? Is the absence of a final answer consistent with Armstrong's approach, or does it call that approach into doubt?

2. By means of direct quotation and paraphrase, many thinkers make their voices heard through Armstrong's own words. At times, this chorus of voices may become so closely fused that readers might have trouble distinguishing Armstrong's own views from the views of the thinkers she draws on. At what moments in the argument does Armstrong speak for herself, and at what moments do other writers speak through her words? Would you say that her accounts of other writers' views are uniformly neutral, or are there places where Armstrong's descriptions become more openly evaluative?

3. How has Armstrong organized this chapter? Why does she start where she does? What is her criteria for choosing examples? Why does she end where she does? Is she making an argument or offering a neutral description of the way things are?

Questions for Writing:

1. Would you say Armstrong herself believes in God? What does "belief" mean to her? What does "God" mean? In what ways does her understanding of religion differ from those you have held or may now hold? Does the word God become nonsensical if people from different times and places have understood it in different ways?

2. Armstrong concludes her argument by citing Thomas Hardy's poem, "The Darkling Thrust," in its entirety. In what sense does Hardy's poem provide a conclusion to Armstrong's discussion? What does the poem have to say that Armstrong couldn't say for herself? Why has she given a poet the final word on the future of god?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:

1. We might say that in "Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul," Jonathan Boyarin also takes on Armstrong's question, "Does God have a future?" But Boyarin poses the question in a rather different way, concerned less with the disappearance of God than with the disappearance of a community of believers. As he recalls, the religious community of his childhood is today "as obliterated as any shtetl in Eastern Europe." If the survival of God depends on the reinvention of such communities in the ways that Boyarin describes, then what are we to make of Armstrong's call for a turn away from a "personal God" and toward a more mystical religion? Will this turn renew waning communities of faith or will it only hasten their disappearance?

2. When Armstrong refers to the future of God, she has in mind primarily the notions of God embraced by theologians and philosophers in Western Europe and the United States. In "The Ganges' Next Life," however, Alexander Stille offers a portrait of religious life among Hindus in South Asia. After reading both Armstrong and Stille, would you say that the "death of God" is a problem only for the West? What forces does Armstrong identify with the gradual decline of religious conviction? Given what Stille tells us about India, are those same forces at work in Veer Bhadra Mishra's world, or does his society face challenges very different from the ones that Armstrong describes?

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