Jack Miles

John R. "Jack" Miles (born July 30, 1942) is an American author and winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship. His writings on religion, politics, and culture 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 or Autobiography 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. Miles was named a MacArthur Fellow for the period 2003–07. Miles is general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Religions (November 2014).

Career

Born in Chicago, the eldest child in a Roman Catholic family, Miles was a Jesuit seminarian from 1960 to 1970, studying at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem before completing a doctorate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages at Harvard University. He is fluent in several languages, including French, Italian, German, Hebrew, and Aramaic.

Jack Miles (political activist)

John Bramwell "Jack" Miles (5 September 1888 – 17 May 1969), also known as J.B.M., was a Scottish-born Australian stonemason and communist leader.

Miles was born at Wilton, Roxburghshire, Scotland, to journeyman mason William Miles and Louisa, née Wiggins. He was educated at Edinburgh and apprenticed to a stonemason in northern England. He was employed at Newcastle and then Consett in Durham, where he joined the Independent Labour Party. On 9 October 1911 he married Elizabeth Jane Black at Lanchester; the couple emigrated to Queensland and arrived in Brisbane on the Orama on 31 March 1913.

Miles was recruited to the Queensland Socialist League in 1918 and was a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1920. Employed as a meatworker from 1920 to 1923 he represented the Australian Meat Industry Employees' Union on the Trades and Labor Council before returning to stonemasonry and representing the United Operative Stonemasons' Society of Queensland. In the late 1920s, having risen to prominence in the CPA, he and Lance Sharkey won control on a platform of strong opposition to the Australian Labor Party's "social fascist" policies. Miles disliked middle-class communist converts, condemning Fred Paterson and John Anderson.