Jack Miles

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.

Jack Miles packs more insights into 100 pages than most anyone else I can think of. I think what I so appreciate is that I feel he is actually exploring and clarifying (and describing the impossibility of ultimate clarification) rather than marshalling arguments, evidence, and historical support for a particular viewpoint. I was busy highlighting fascinating tidbits that I had somehow missed or forgotten in my reading on religion (e.g. the roots of the words paganism and heathenism), as well show more as the profound and poetic quotations that Miles includes (from Bertrand Russell to Marcel Proust) without ever being pretentious, and his own beautiful prose (the last paragraph is among the best I have read). The last essay has the same title as a recent Elaine Pagels book (which I also gave five stars). Guess I appreciate those writers who can incorporate the scholarly and the personal into a profoundly meaningful experience. show less

Jack Miles says he wrote this book--following the example of C.S. Lewis--because it was a book that he would want to read that no one had written yet. He (along with John Shelby Spong and Bart Ehrman) definitely writes books I would like to have written in another life where I was a writer of books about religion and scriptures. I found it engrossing, engaging, and the most informative book I have yet read about the character of Allah and the message(s) of the Qur'an. I love the whole show more premise of this "trilogy," approaching the scriptures of the Abrahamic traditions as a literary critic and examining God as the central character. Don't know where you go from here, Mr. Miles, but I'm anxious to find out. show less

What sort of person is God? What is his life story? Is it possible to approach him not as an object of religious reference, but as the protagonist of the world's greatest book -- as a character who possesses all the depths, contradictions, and ambiguities 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 this book.