The Raymond Schwager, S. J. Memorial Lecture
Introduction by Joel Hodge
Jack Miles, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English & Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of God: A Biography for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 and of Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, which led his being named a MacArthur Fellow for the years 2002-2006. Most recently, Jack led a team of seven scholars who together produced the mammoth Norton Anthology of World Religions, published in hardcover in 2014 and in six paperback volumes in 2016. Miles spent ten years as editor at Doubleday and executive editor at the University of California Press, then another ten as literary editor of the Los Angeles Times and later a member of the Times’ editorial board, writing anonymously on politics, culture, and religion. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Commonweal, and many other publications. In November, Alfred A. Knopf will publish Jack’s next book, God in the Qur’an. He was fruitfully introduced to the work of René Girard by Andrew McKenna in the early 1970s and currently serves on the Board of the Raven Foundation.