Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer

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.

Author: Christopher Beha
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 02/17/2026
Pages: 432
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.61h x 6.11w x 1.81d
ISBN: 9780593490471


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2026

About the Author
Christopher Beha is the former editor of Harper's Magazine and the author of four previous books, including The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, which was nominated for the 2020 National Book Award.