Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

This week’s reading list explores religious understanding and our different beliefs.

1. “Your Belief Here.” (Joelle Renstrom, Killing the Buddha, October 2013)

Renstrom’s cross-wearing Christian classmates didn’t understand her agnostic Unitarian beliefs, which blend ethics, interfaith understanding, science and more.

2. “Dear Oprah: Atheists Exist.” (Nico Lang, Thought Catalog, October 2013)

The public erasure of atheistic beliefs belies a wariness of what we don’t want to understand. Hear that, Oprah?

3. “Study Theology, Even If You Don’t Believe in God.” (Tara Isabella Burton, The Atlantic, October 2013)

“A good theologian, he says, ‘has to be a historian, a philosopher, a linguist, a skillful interpreter of texts both ancient and modern, and probably many other things besides.’ In many ways, a course in theology is an ideal synthesis of all other liberal arts: no longer, perhaps, ‘Queen of the Sciences,’ but at least, as Wood terms it, ‘Queen of the Humanities.’”