Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life: Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor

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In a time of plague, fundamental questions become immediate and personal. The pandemic, droughts, floods, fire, political violence: the world has been grimly reminded of the proximity and inevitability of death.

Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor are both acclaimed public intellectuals and scholars of religion, one a Christian and the other an atheist, close friends for fifty years. They have spent their lives grappling with questions of ultimate concern. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, locked down at home and facing an uncertain future, Miles and Taylor embarked on an extended conversation about living and dying in an imperiled world.

A Friendship in Twilight is their plague journal. In raw and searching letters, written daily from the first lockdowns through the Capitol riot, Miles and Taylor reflect on life during overlapping crises. Amid the menace of the pandemic and the unceasing political turmoil, they debate the lessons that a catastrophic present can teach about the future and how to read, think, live, and face up to death.

Jack Miles is professor emeritus of English and religious studies at the University of California, Irvine. A former Jesuit, he is the author of a trilogy about God in three classic scriptures, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning God: A Biography (1995), and the general editor of the six-volume Norton Anthology of World Religions.

Mark C. Taylor is professor of religion at Columbia University and professor emeritus at Williams College. He is the author of more than thirty books, including most recently Intervolution: Smart Bodies Smart Things (Columbia, 2020). His art has been exhibited at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the Clark Art Institute.

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