About this item
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 the Author
Dear Fellow Reader:Let's keep reading, shall we? I myself would rather read than write. I'd also rather think than read, and I'd rather dream than think. But this world is not made for dreamers, and so sometimes when I find myself thinking about something, I write about it if no one else has written the book I want to read. Mine is a crazy-quilt background. I'm an ex-Jesuit, an ex-atheist, an ex-journalist, an ex-professor, and currently I'm--well, for the further particulars, you can check me out at www.JackMiles.com. I write about religion, literature, and politics in ever-changing combinations, sometimes veering a bit into music or visual art. Arthur Koestler wrote about the great early astronomer Johannes Kepler that the man never wrote a page that was not alive and kicking. Pages are alive and kicking when their author is after something. It can be something grand: Kepler was after the orbits of the planets. It can be something small: a dog can be after a flea with great intensity. If that's the kind of reading you go for, well, I hope we meet someday! You're my kind of reader.Jack Miles
