Jack Miles

Over a period of nearly 20 years (1975-95), Miles was successively an editor at Doubleday, the executive editor at the University of California Press, the literary editor at the Los Angeles Times, and a member of the Times editorial board, writing on politics and culture. A Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages from Harvard University, Miles has been a Mellon visiting professor of humanities at Caltech, the director of the Humanities Center at the Claremont Graduate University, the regents lecturer at the University of California, and a visiting fellow with the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago.

Born in Chicago in 1942, Miles was a Jesuit seminarian from 1960 to '70, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before beginning his doctoral studies at Harvard. He is fluent in several languages. You can read more about Miles and his work at jackmiles.com.

Since 1986, he has lived in Pasadena, Calif., with his wife, Jacqueline, a psychologist, and their daughter, Kathleen, a shortstop.