Reading List

Humanists are a part of a wider phenomenon in religion in the United States where people are increasingly identifying as nonreligious (“nones”) and coming together outside of traditional religious communities. If you’d like to explore some of the different questions that the “rise of the Nones” phenomenon raises, these are a few books across genres that have offered meaningful engagement with (post-)secularism, atheism, and Humanism in recent years:

• A Life of Courage: Sherwin Wine and Humanistic Judaism by Dan Cohn-Sherbok (2004)
• Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett (1995)
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2007)
• Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of America’s Nones by Elizabeth Drescher (2016)
• Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe by Greg Epstein (2009)
• 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Goldstein (2010)
• Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht (2003)
• Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars by Sikivu Hutchinson (2011)
• The Witch is Not a Witch: The Dynamics and Contestations of Witchcraft Accusations in Northern Ghana by Leo Igwe (2016)
• Consuming Religion by Kathryn Lofton (2017)
• By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism by Anthony Pinn (2001)
• Contact by Carl Sagan (1985)
• Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious by Chris Stedman (2012)
• In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Prose by Alice Walker (1983)
• We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom by Tisa Wenger (2009)