Jack Miles

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Jack Miles (b. 1942) is a linguist, scholar, and author whose work 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, God: A Biography, 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. Since publishing it, Dr. Miles has been named a MacArthur Fellow for the period 2003–07.

[edit] Career

Born in Chicago in 1942, 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, senior advisor to the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, and a visiting fellow with the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago.

Currently senior fellow with the Pacific Council on International Policy and visiting scholar at Occidental College, Jack Miles lives in Southern California with his wife, Jacqueline, a psychologist. Their daughter, Kathleen is attending Berkeley.

[edit] 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