Is the soul purely religious? The answer to that question and to the alleged divine sides of the soul were provided by the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra and the British writer Karen Armstrong. Pankaj Mishra wrote the eassay-like travel novel The Buddha in the World, about his quest for the Buddha and the meaning of Buddhism. Karen Armstrong is one of the greatest writers of religion. In the 1960s she spent seven years as a nun in a Roman Catholic education congregation convent. Her personal memories and views on the failure of the church, the nature of religion, loneliness and spiritual experiences were laid down in her book Through the Narrow Gate. Her book A History of God, a cultural history of one thousand years of Christianity, Judaism and Islam were a worldwide bestseller. In it she wrote: 'The secularization which we are currently witnessing is a totally new experiment which has never occurred in the history of man before.' English spoken.