About Jack Miles

J A C K   M I L E S . . .        

          . . . General editor of The Norton Anthology of World Religions (W.W. Norton, November 2014). Most recently, Jack co-authored a book of correspondence between him and a friend, Mark C. Taylor, titled A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life, about many topics from religion, philosophy, academia and nature during the deadly 2020 double pandemic of COVID-19 and Trumpism.

          His previous book is Religion As We Know It: An Origin Story (Alfred A. Knopf, November 2019). Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English & Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and Senior Fellow for Religion & International Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy, Jack Miles is a writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Commonweal 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. In 2018, Miles completed the God in Three Classic Scriptures series with God in the Qur'an.

          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. For ten years, he served on the Committee of Selection of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

          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.

Miles is married to Catherine (Kitty) Miles and is the father of Kathleen Miles, currently Executive Editor of Noema, a magazine exploring the transformations sweeping our world. Since 2008, he has made his home in Orange County, CA. Miles is represented by the Georges Borchardt Agency: www.gbagency.com. His full curriculum vitae is available on request.