Indeed, consider the dramatis personae of religiously attuned literature over the past fifty years, from Graham Greene’s whisky priest to Walker Percy’s Dr. Thomas More to Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder, even Marilynne Robinson’s Protestant pastor in Gilead: not a one matches the caricature of either the new atheists’ straw men or fundamentalist confidence. Their worlds seem as fraught as our own — and more honestly fraught than the areligious, de-transcendentalized universes created by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen.
