Jack Miles Books in Order

Reading the Hebrew Bible as literature, Jack Miles follows God as a changing central character. Creation, violence, law and encounters with humanity reveal a contradictory personality whose development reshapes familiar stories and the relationship between deity and people.

Jack Miles reads the Gospels as a continuation of God’s troubled relationship with Israel. His interpretation of Jesus’s life and death asks how a divine promise can survive conquest, suffering and an apparent surrender to human vulnerability.

Jack Miles examines Allah’s character through the Qur’an, comparing its stories with related passages in Jewish and Christian scriptures. The resulting portrait explores divine mercy, religious continuity and differences obscured by familiar Western assumptions about Islam.

Jack Miles traces how Western thinkers came to separate religion from other aspects of life. Beginning with Christianity and following Europe’s encounters with other cultures, he explores the changing assumptions behind a category that can seem self-evident.

During the pandemic, longtime friends Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor exchange letters about mortality, belief and a country in crisis. Their differing religious convictions frame a personal conversation about aging, political turmoil and the value of friendship.