Jack Miles

Jack Miles (born 1942) is an American author and winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship. His work on religion, politics, and culture has appeared in numerous national publications, including "The Atlantic Monthly", "The New York Times", "The Boston Globe", "The Washington Post", and "The Los Angeles Times".

Miles treats his biblical subjects neither as transcendent deities or historical figures, but as literary protagonists. His first book, , won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1996 and has been translated into sixteen languages. His second book, "Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God", was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2002. Miles was named a MacArthur Fellow for the period 2003–07.

Career

Born in Chicago, Jack Miles was a Jesuit seminarian from 1960 to 1970, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before completing a doctorate in the department of Near Eastern Languages at Harvard. He is fluent in several languages.

Over a period of nearly twenty years (1975–95), Jack Miles was an editor at Doubleday, the executive editor at the University of California Press, the literary editor at "The Los Angeles Times", and a member of the "Times" editorial board, writing on politics and culture.

Jack Miles has been a Mellon visiting professor of humanities at Caltech, the director of the Humanities Center at the Claremont Graduate University, a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, a visiting fellow with the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago, and scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute.

Currently senior fellow for religious affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions, Jack Miles became, in 2008, Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He lives in Southern California with his wife, Jacqueline, a psychologist. Their daughter, Kathleen graduated from Berkeley. He is a practicing Episcopalian.

Books

*"God: A Biography" (1995) Alfred A. Knopf, 1996 Vintage paperback: ISBN 0-679-74368-5
*"Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God" (2001) Alfred A. Knopf, 2002 Vintage paperback: ISBN 0-679-78160-9

External links

* [http://www.jackmiles.com/ Jack Miles Online]
* [http://www.beliefnet.com/author/author_47.html Biography and index] of columns written for Beliefnet