Jack Miles

"A short, provocative book on religion from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. In his new book, acclaimed scholar Jack Miles poses a question: 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-Miles reveals how we in the West have come to isolate religion as an object of study,...

Who is Allah? What makes Him unique? And what does He ask of those who submit to His teachings? The God of the Qur'an revises and perfects: His purpose is to make whole what had been corrupted or lost from the practices and scriptures of the earlier Abrahamic religions. Setting passages from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an side by side, Miles illuminates what is unique about Allah, His teachings and His temperament, and in doing...

"No modern, well-versed literature lover can call an education complete without having read Augustine's Confessions. Irrefutably, from the time it was written in the fourth century AD until today, the Confessions is one of the most important autobiographical texts for Christians and non-Christians alike, having influenced writers from Montaigne to Rousseau, Woolf to Stein. While it sometimes has been read as a merely religious text, or even as a private...