JACK MILES

Who is Allah? What does He ask of those who submit to His teachings? Pulitzer Prize-winner Jacke Miles gives us a deeply probing, revelatory portrait of the worlds second largest, fastest-growing and perhaps most tragically misunderstood religion. In doing so, Miles illuminates what is unique about Allah, His teachings, and His resolutely merciful temperament, and he thereby reveals that which is false, distorted, or simply absent from the popular conception of the heart of Islam. So, too, does Miles uncover the spiritual and scriptural continuity of the Islamic tradition with those of Judaism and Christianity, and the deep affinities among the three by setting passages from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran side by side. In the spirit of his two previous books, God and Christ, and with his characteristic sensitivity, perspicacity and prodigious command of the subject, Miles calls for us all to read anothers scriptures with the same understanding and accommodating eye that we turn upon our own.

With the same passionate scholarship and analytical audacity he brought to the character of God, Jack Miles now approaches the literary and theological enigma of Jesus. In so doing, he tells the story of a broken promiseGods ancient covenant with Israeland of its strange, unlooked-for fulfillment. For, having abandoned his chosen people to an impending holocaust at the hands of their Roman conquerors. God, in the person of Jesus, chooses to die with them, in what is effectively an act of divine suicide. On the basis of this shocking argument, Miles compels us to reassess Christs entire life and teaching: His proclivity for the powerless and disgraced. His refusal to discriminate between friends and enemies. His transformation of defeat into a victory that redeems not just Israel but the entire world. Combining a close reading of the Gospels with a range of reference that includes Donne, Nietzche, and Elie Wiesel, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God is a work of magnificent eloquence and imagination.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEWhat sort of "person" is God? What is his "life story"? Is it possible to approach him not as an object of religious reverence, but as the protagonist of the worlds greatest bookas a character who possesses all the depths, contradictions, and abiguities of a Hamlet? This is the task that Jack Milesa former Jesuit trained in religious studies and Near Eastern languagesaccomplishes with such brilliance and originality in God: A Biography.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.