God: A Biography
by Jack Miles
List Price: $15.00
Pages: 464
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0679743685
Publisher: Vintage
Jack Miles was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1942. Raised a Roman
Catholic, he entered the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) after high school
and, as a Jesuit in training, spent two years at the Pontifical Gregorian
University in Rome studying philosophy and another year studying Hebrew
and archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1967, just after
the Six Days War, he left Israel and went to Harvard University, where
in 1971 he was awarded a doctorate in Near Eastern languages, specializing
in Hebrew and in the Bible.
Miles was impatient with the
heavily historical way the Bible was studied at Harvard (and at virtually
all American universities). After only four years of full-time teaching,
he gave up on academic life. For ten years, he worked in book publishing,
first as an editor at Doubleday in New York and then as executive editor
of the University of California Press. While living in Los Angeles, he
began writing for the Los Angeles Times, where in 1985 he became
literary editor and in 1991 was appointed to the newspaper's prestigious
editorial board.
Having left the Jesuits in
1970 and become an Episcopalian in 1980, Miles found to his surprise that
questions he thought he had left behind, questions about the Bible and
about the difficult character of God, were crowding in on the political
issues that it was his professional responsibility to address as a member
of the Times editorial board.
In 1990, unable to keep these
questions at bay any longer, he went on leave from the newspaper and began
the book that in 1995 was published as GOD: A Biography. Shortly
after the publication of this book, he left the Times to take the position
he now holds as director of the Humanities Center at the Claremont Graduate
School in Claremont, California, a small town about an hour east of downtown
Los Angeles.
Miles remains active as a
journalist. He is a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly
and his work appears frequently in both scholarly and popular publications,
including The New York Times
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