J A C K   M I L E S. . .

          . . . Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy is a writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and many other publications.  His book GOD: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 and has been translated into sixteen languages, including Hebrew and (twice) Chinese.  A sequel to that book entitled CHRIST: A Crisis in the Life of God—published simultaneously in 2001 in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France—was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and led to Miles being named a MacArthur Fellow in 2002.

          Over a period of nearly twenty years, 1975-1995, Miles was successively an editor at Doubleday, executive editor at the University of California Press, literary editor at the Los Angeles Times, and finally a member of the Times Editorial Board, writing on politics and culture. He serves on the final selection committee of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and is general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.

          Miles has been at different times Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities at Caltech, Director of the Humanities Center at the Claremont Graduate University, Scholar in Residence and Senior Advisor at the J. Paul Getty Trust, and Visiting Fellow with the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science, University of Chicago.

          Born in Chicago in 1942, he spent the years 1960-1970 as a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before enrolling at Harvard University where he completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages in 1971.  He is fluent in several modern languages.

Since 1978, Miles has made his home in Southern California with his wife, Jacqueline, a clinical psychologist, and their daughter, Kathleen.

Jack Miles' Curriculum Vitae (MS Word doc) below.