Religion as We Know It, Jack Miles
Religion as We Know It, Jack Miles
List: $12.99 | Sale: $9.10
Club: $6.49

Religion as We Know It
An Origin Story

Author: Jack Miles

Narrator: David Cochran Heath

Unabridged: 3 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/12/2019

Synopsis

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. 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.

About Jack Miles

Jack Miles is Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies with the University of California at Irvine and Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy. He spent 1960-70 as a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before enrolling at Harvard University, where he completed a PhD in Near Eastern languages in 1971. His book God: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996, and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God led to his being named a MacArthur Fellow for 2003-07.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim

This is the introduction to The Norton Anthology of World Religions which he edited & it's long enough to break out as its own book of 128 pages. I listened to it, but I don't see an English audio edition. It was well read & intriguing, but I have no desire to read the 4500 page 2 volume anthology.......more

Goodreads review by Christopher

First, Goodreads has the wrong number of pages, so let me clear this up. For my copy, ISBN-13 9781324002789, there are XL, 152 pages, with the notes, credits, and index beginning on page 141. That means this little book involves about 180 pages of reading. So how were those pages of reading? Elucidat......more

Goodreads review by Dan

This is one of those works that I feel somewhat inadequate to evaluate in that it functions as an introduction to Jack Miles' massively curated Norton Anthology of World Religions, yet stands on its own as an extended précis to the study of comparative religion as a discipline, while also portraying......more

Goodreads review by Will

This book is the forward to the latest Norton anthology of world religion. As such, it serves as an excellent introduction to how our conception of religion, itself — as a row of cafeteria-style options in a marketplace of ideas — is indebted to Western and Christian bias. The author does this by pr......more

Goodreads review by Ellie

not terrible. miles’s insight about early christianity’s conception of ‘religion’ as a separate realm from politics, culture, ethnicity etc. being derived from its universality and opportunity for conversion was very compelling. i also like learning how western the categories of hinduISM taoISM budd......more

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List