The best books on atheism

Telling the life story of Dorothy Day (1897 – 1980) was like falling down the rabbit hole. How was it possible for a woman born to a conservative, racist, anti-Semitic family with no interest in religion to become America’s staunchest advocate for the homeless, most determined pacifist and critic of capitalism, a supporter of civil rights, a believer in civil disobedience willing to go to jail to protest the arms race – and an orthodox Catholic. The paradoxes of this woman never ceased to intrigue me. Her journey from her hard-drinking, sexually active, unsettled youth in Greenwich Village to her conversion and founding of the radical Catholic Worker movement is the subject of the book I wrote with my co-author, Blythe Randolph. Day is a person who made a mark in her time, as both a critic and champion of her Church, a unique figure in women’s history and religious history in this country, and a charismatic individual too little-known today. She is the anti-Trump of modern America.

Would you willingly wear the cardigan of a killer? Do you think you can tell when you are being watched by someone you can’t see? Do you believe in ghosts or spirits? Even in this modern scientific era, most people believe in phenomena that if true would violate the laws of Nature. Even individuals who are not religious hold supernatural beliefs even though they may not be aware of them. In SuperSense, I trace the origin of magical thinking to the development of children’s thinking. Rather than indoctrination, I argue that children are naturally inclined to infer the presence of hidden structure, energies, essences, and all manner of causal entities that lay the foundation for later adult magical beliefs that can operate implicitly in our thinking. 

Jane Whitefield helps people disappear. Fearing for their lives, fleeing dangerous situations, her clients come to her when they need to vanish completely—to assume a new identity and establish a new life somewhere they won’t be found. And when people are desperate enough to need her services, they come to the old house in rural western New York where Jane was raised to begin their escape.

I have not (yet!) had Death as a character, though I suspect that I will one day. My books range from YA to adult fantasy novels, usually with something supernatural in them. I’ve written werecreatures of all types, ghosts, demons, with a dragon or two sprinkled in here and there.

This book may not have Death in it, but it has plenty of the lowercase kind. An Unkindness of Ravens centers on Denevah, a poisonous girl whose very touch can kill. She’s been created for one thing—vengeance—and she’s about to be unleashed on a city that doesn’t even know she exists.

We think we know the history of faith: how Christian belief declined as philosophy and science blossomed and a secular age dawned. But human beings, intuitive creatures that we are, don’t actually make decisions that way. The choices that really matter for our lives are ones we make emotionally, with our whole selves. It’s true when people choose faith; and it’s true when people reject it.

This book is a history of atheism with the emotion put back in: a story of how anger at a corrupt priest or anxiety in a turbulent moment have kindled religious doubt, a story that reaches much further back into the past than we normally think and which still drives what how we believe and how we doubt today.

We think we know the history of faith: how Christian belief declined as philosophy and science blossomed and a secular age dawned. But human beings, intuitive creatures that we are, don’t actually make decisions that way. The choices that really matter for our lives are ones we make emotionally, with our whole selves. It’s true when people choose faith; and it’s true when people reject it.

This book is a history of atheism with the emotion put back in: a story of how anger at a corrupt priest or anxiety in a turbulent moment have kindled religious doubt, a story that reaches much further back into the past than we normally think and which still drives what how we believe and how we doubt today.

For Athene Howard, the only child of renowned cultural anthropologist Charles Howard, life is an unexciting, disillusioned academic project. When she encounters a clairvoyant Dominican postulant, a stern nun, and a recusant English nobleman embarked on a quest for a feral Franciscan werewolf, the strange new world of enchantment and horror intoxicates and delights her—even as it brings to light her father’s complex past and his long-dormant relationship with the Church of Rome. Can Athene and her newfound compatriots battle against the ruthless forces of darkness that howl for the overthrow of civilization and the devouring of so many wounded souls?

In this sister novel to A Bloody Habit, the incomparable Father Thomas Edmund Gilroy, O.P. returns to face occult demons, gypsy curses, possessed maidens, and tormented werewolves.

Reincarnation and time travel are the scaffold of a five-thousand-year saga of exile, love, and loss. In an Arctic wasteland, a quantum biologist is transformed into a vengeful warrior when her husband is butchered and served at a feast. In Bronze-Age Mesopotamia she is a teacher and community leader trying to cope with the violent animosity between tribes. In a modern city, before she is born her father is expected to stop an invasion by demons holding a five-thousand-year-old grudge.

Greed and bigotry challenge grace, generosity, and empathy. It’s a struggle fought with humor, magic, lasers, stone knives, and nuclear weapons. It’s a struggle worth immersing yourself in.

Saint Joan of New York is a novel about a modern-day Joan of Arc, a 17-year-old math genius who becomes obsessed with discovering the Theory of Everything. Joan Cooper is a lonely, confused high-school student in New York City, but she also has an extraordinary gift for mathematics. Traumatized by the recent death of her older sister, Joan tries to rebuild her shattered world by studying string theory and the efforts to unify the laws of physics. But as she tackles the complex equations, she falls prey to disturbing visions of a divine being who wants to help her unveil the universe’s mathematical design. Joan must enter the battle between science and religion, fighting for her sanity and a new understanding of the cosmos.

We think we know the history of faith: how Christian belief declined as philosophy and science blossomed and a secular age dawned. But human beings, intuitive creatures that we are, don’t actually make decisions that way. The choices that really matter for our lives are ones we make emotionally, with our whole selves. It’s true when people choose faith; and it’s true when people reject it.

This book is a history of atheism with the emotion put back in: a story of how anger at a corrupt priest or anxiety in a turbulent moment have kindled religious doubt, a story that reaches much further back into the past than we normally think and which still drives what how we believe and how we doubt today.