The former nun and writer on world religion talks to Peter Stanford about how early Christians experienced God in the natural world – a bond we must urgently recover in the face of the climate crisis

“I’VE LONG had trouble with God.” Karen Armstrong is talking specifically about the contrast between Christianity with its concept of a faraway God, “stuck in the highest heaven”, and Eastern religions where there is much more of a sense of God being present and close at hand in nature. It is the point she makes in her new and challenging – “I don’t usually like telling people what to do but we are in real trouble” – book, Sacred Nature, which examines how people of faith can rise emotionally and spiritually, as well as practically, to the climate crisis.