Religion as We Know It
An Origin Story
A brief, beautiful invitation to the study of religion from a Pulitzer Prize winner. How did our forebears begin to think about religion as a distinct domain, separate from other activities that were once inseparable from it? Starting at the birth of Christianity—a religion inextricably bound to Western thought—Jack Miles reveals how the West’s “common sense” understanding of religion emerged and then changed as insular Europe discovered the rest of the world. In a moving postscript, he shows how this very story continues today in the hearts of individual religious or irreligious men and women.
JACK MILES pursued religious studies at Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, and the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and holds a doctorate in Near Eastern languages from Harvard University. In 2002 he was named a MacArthur Fellow, and he currently serves as Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and Senior Fellow for Religion and International Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy. In the 2018-2019 academic year, he will serve as Corcoran Visiting Professor of Christian and Jewish Learning at Boston College. His book God: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize. He served as editor for the Los Angeles Times Book Review and was a member of that newspaper's editorial board. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The…