Join the Jesuit Media Lab Book Club for a live Zoom conversation with author Christopher Beha on his new book “Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.” The live event will be facilitated by JML Book Club moderators Nick Ripatrazone and Mike Jordan Laskey.

About “Why I Am Not an Atheist”

Named One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2026
One of The New York Times’s anticipated books of February!

What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?

National Book Award-longlisted author Christopher Beha recounts his struggle with these questions while making an earnest appeal for readers to seek out answers of their own.

Twenty-five years ago, celebrated author (and cradle Catholic) Christopher Beha gave up on God. Helped along by a reading of Bertrand Russell’s classic text  “Why I Am Not a Christian,” he became a committed atheist, certain that his days of belief were behind him. A youthful brush with mortality soon set Beha on a decades-long quest for meaning in a godless world.

“Why I Am Not an Atheist” tells the story of this search for secular answers to what Immanuel Kant called the most urgent human questions: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? Along the way, Beha traces the development of what he understands to be the two major atheist worldviews: scientific materialism and romantic idealism.

Beha’s passage through these rival forms of atheism leads him to the surprising conclusion that faith — particularly faith in a created order in which each human life has a meaningful part — preserves the best of both traditions while offering a complete and coherent picture of reality.

This magisterial investigation of the heights of human intellectual achievement is at once deeply personal and universal — grounded in decades of reading and thinking about the problems of suffering, mortality and ultimate meaning. “Why I Am Not an Atheist” is not a polemic on behalf of belief but a record of Beha’s long engagement with the enduring human questions and a call for readers to take up these questions for themselves.

About Christopher Beha

Christopher Beha is the author of “Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer” and four previous books, including the novels “What Happened to Sophie Wilder” and “The Index of Self-Destructive Acts.”