Showing results by author "Jack Miles" in All Categories

This long-awaited translation of Confessions, which Stephen Greenblatt describes as central to the legacy of Adam and Eve, enlivens the beguiling world of late antiquity. No modern, well-versed literature lover can call her education complete without having listened to Augustine’s Confessions. One of the most original works of world literature, it is the first autobiography ever written, influencing writers from Montaigne to Rousseau, Virginia Woolf to Gertrude Stein.

Who is Allah? What does he ask of those who submit to his teachings? Pulitzer Prize-winner Jack Miles gives us a deeply probing, revelatory portrait of the world’s 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.

These stories are set in the familiar quasi-medieval worlds to which modern listeners are accustomed, and also stories rooted in the authentic myth-constructs of high antiquity, along with several that depend for their power on the juxtaposition of fantastic situations and terribly contemporary aspects of modern life on Earth. Together these stories make up a collection which provides reassuring proof of fantasy's eternal power in this technological age.

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. Finally, in a moving postscript, he shows how this very story continues today in the minds and hearts of individual religious or irreligious men and women.