Christopher Beha with David Brooks: Why I Am Not an Atheist

National Book Award nominee Christopher Beha joins us with The New York Times’ David Brooks for a conversation about faith and finding meaning in a disordered world — and his new book, Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.

Over two decades ago, celebrated author Christopher Beha gave up on God. Helped along by a reading of Bertrand Russell’s classic Why I Am Not a Christian, he rejected the Catholicism that he had grown up with and became a committed atheist, certain that his days of belief were behind him.

But a youthful brush with mortality soon set Beha on a decades-long quest for meaning. Why I Am Not an Atheist tells the story of his search for answers to some of humanity’s deepest questions about life in an increasingly secular culture, the nature of reality, and who we are. At once deeply personal and grounded in decades of reading and thinking about the problems of suffering, mortality, and ultimate meaning, Why I Am Not an Atheist is a record of Beha’s long engagement with these enduring human questions — and a stirring call for the rest of us to take up these questions for ourselves.

In a celebration of the book’s launch, hear Beha and David Brooks — himself a searching thinker about the function and value of religion in American culture — in a candid, moving look into the meaning of faith in the 21st century.

“Powerful and poignant, heartfelt and erudite, [Beha’s] literary artistry sparkles as his heart yearns for and burns with transcendence!” — Cornel West