Armstrong ch. 5-8

The thing that caught my attention about these four chapters was Karen Armstrong's ability to make the story, per se, flow. Having grown up in a fairly religious household, many of the biblical stories and characters in these chapters are events and names that sound very familiar to me. But they are not events that I necessarily connected with one another, or even placed in a particular geographic location. For me, religious stories always seemed somehow removed from concrete spatial dimensions. This is not to discredit any religious stories. Rather, it is the sense of mysticism that was attached to it. Within these four chapters however, Karen Armstrong connects all these stories, times, people, and places that for some reason I always pictured as separate. In addition, she adds the element of concrete history by blending biblical stories with historical accounts that we learned in history class. The one particular section that really illustrates this is when she talks about Julius Caesar and his subsequent downfall. These four chapters for me were a combination of old biblical stories I learned growing up, specific chunks of various history class, and a good amount of new information all presented in a completely new and rearranged way.