Jack Miles

A new reading of the Hebrew Bible explores the infinitely complex roles of God, from his first appearance as the Creator to his last as the Ancient of Days. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

A Biography

God in the Qurʼan

Teresa Martinho Toldy

Deus: uma biografia

سيرة الله

Jane Dammen McAuliffe

Wendy Doniger

James Robson

Lawrence Cunningham

David Biale

Lopez, Donald S. Jr

The Norton anthology of world religions

Mark C. Taylor

Jonathan Z. Smith

Edith Wyschogrod

David Tracy

Tomoko Masuzawa

Following in the very successful tradition of Critical Terms for Literary Studies and Critical Terms for Art History, this book attempts to provide a revitalized, self-aware vocabulary with which this bewildering religious diversity can be accurately described and responsibly discussed. Leading scholars working in a variety of traditions demonstrate through their incisive discussions that even our most basic terms for understanding religion are not neutral but carry specific historical and conceptual freight.

Critical Terms for Religious Studies

In a time of plague, fundamental questions become immediate and personal. The pandemic, droughts, floods, fire, political violence: the world has been grimly reminded of the proximity and inevitability of death. Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor—acclaimed public intellectuals and scholars of religion, one a Christian and the other an atheist, close friends for fifty years—have spent their lives grappling with questions of ultimate concern. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, locked down at home and facing an uncertain future, Miles and Taylor embarked on an extended conversation about living and dying in an imperiled world. A Friendship in Twilight is their plague journal. In raw and searching letters, written daily from the first lockdowns through the Capitol riot, Miles and Taylor reflect on life during overlapping crises. Amid the menace of the pandemic and the unceasing political turmoil, they debate the lessons that a catastrophic present can teach about the future and how to read, think, live, and face up to death. Confronting the vulnerability of their aging bodies and the frailty of American democracy, the two friends discuss why and how philosophical reflection matters for a wounded world. Their conversations are imbued with an ever-present sense of urgency about the worth of a life, the fragility of existence, and the uncertainty of endings. Seamlessly moving from heartfelt emotion to philosophical speculation, current events to great art and literature, this book is a powerful and moving testament to the precarity of life and to enduring friendship.

Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life

A Friendship in Twilight

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning God: A Biography, Jack Miles offered a highly original approach to the character of the God of the Old Testament, addressing him as a character in a book, a literary charter. In Christ, reading the New Testament but hearing t

A Crisis in the Life of God

Christ

Wie is Allah? Wat maakt hem bijzonder? Wat wil hij? Op deze vragen probeert Jack Miles een antwoord te geven. Vanuit een literair standpunt en met grote belezenheid analyseert Miles de Koranverhalen over personen die ook uit de Bijbel bekend zijn, zoals Adam en Eva, Abraham, Mozes, Maria en Jezus. Omdat Allah in de Koran voortdurend zelf aan het woord is, zeggen die verhalen veel over hem. Allah gaat ervan uit dat zijn profeet Mohammed de Bijbelse overleveringen kent. Hij corrigeert wat daarin volgens hem niet klopt en vult aan wat joden en christenen verloren hebben laten gaan. Uit de aanvullingen en correcties in de Koran komt Allah naar voren als een god die weet wat hij wil, namelijk exclusieve aanbidding door alle mensen. Daarbij vergeleken is de God van de Bijbel een vat vol tegenstrijdigheden. God in de Koran is zonder enige religieuze vooringenomenheid geschreven. Dit boek richt zich nadrukkelijk tot lezers van alle godsdienstige en niet-godsdienstige stromingen. Het enige wat van de lezer gevraagd wordt is de bereidheid om zijn of haar ongeloof tijdelijk opzij te zetten en het spel mee te spelen. Het uiteindelijke doel: kennismaken met elkaars tradities, zodat we in vrede kunnen leven.

God in de Koran

Who is Allah? What does He ask of those who submit to His teachings? Pulitzer Prize-winner Jacke Miles gives us a deeply probing, revelatory portrait of the world’s second largest, fastest-growing and perhaps most tragically misunderstood religion. In doing so, Miles illuminates what is unique about Allah, His teachings, and His resolutely merciful temperament, and he thereby reveals that which is false, distorted, or simply absent from the popular conception of the heart of Islam. So, too, does Miles uncover the spiritual and scriptural continuity of the Islamic tradition with those of Judaism and Christianity, and the deep affinities among the three by setting passages from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an side by side. In the spirit of his two previous books, God and Christ, and with his characteristic sensitivity, perspicacity and prodigious command of the subject, Miles calls for us all to read another’s scriptures with the same understanding and accommodating eye that we turn upon our own.

God in the Qur'an

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE What sort of "person" is God? What is his "life story"? Is it possible to approach him not as an object of religious reverence, but as the protagonist of the world's greatest book—as a character who possesses all the depths, contradictions, and abiguities of a Hamlet? This is the task that Jack Miles—a former Jesuit trained in religious studies and Near Eastern languages—accomplishes with such brilliance and originality in God: A Biography. Using the Hebrew Bible as his text, Miles shows us a God who evolves through his relationship with man, the image who in time becomes his rival. Here is the Creator who nearly destroys his chief creation; the bloodthirsty warrior and the protector of the downtrodden; the lawless law-giver; the scourge and the penitent. Profoundly learned, stylishly written, the resulting work illuminates God and man alike and returns us to the Bible with a sense of discovery and wonder.

God: A Biography

A brief, beautiful invitation to the study of religion from a Pulitzer Prize winner. How did our forebears begin to think about religion as a distinct domain, separate from other activities that were once inseparable from it? Starting at the birth of Christianity—a religion inextricably bound to Western thought—Jack Miles reveals how the West’s “common sense” understanding of religion emerged and then changed as insular Europe discovered the rest of the world. In a moving postscript, he shows how this very story continues today in the hearts of individual religious or irreligious men and women.

Jack Miles

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