What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?Twenty-five years ago, celebrated author Christopher Beha gave up on God. After reading 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 and 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 leads him to the surprising conclusion that faith preserves the best of both traditions while offering a complete and coherent picture of reality.This deeply personal yet universal investigation delves into suffering, mortality and ultimate meaning, calling readers to take up these questions for themselves.Ebury Vine: The Home Of Christian Living. Drawing on the deep roots of Christianity to cultivate curious minds and inspire faith-informed growth.
A drama teacher finds unlikely celebrity thanks to a nearly forgotten sex tape in this ingenious . . . entertaining and thought provoking" novel (Booklist).At thirty-three, Eddie Hartley has given up his dream of becoming an actor for the reality of life as a drama teacher at a boys'' prep school. But when Eddie and his wife, Susan, discover they cannot have children, it is one disappointment too many.Weighted down with debt, his wife''s mounting unhappiness, and his own deepening sense of failure, Eddie is confronted with an alluring solution when an old friend-turned-web-impresario suggests Eddie sell a sex tape he made with an ex-girlfriend, now a wildly popular television star. Overcoming his initial moral qualms, Eddie figures that in an era when any publicity is good publicity, the tape won''t cause any harm—a decision that will propel him straight into the glaring spotlight he once thought he craved.A hilariously biting and incisive take-down of our culture''s monstrous obsession with fame, Arts & Entertainments is also a poignant and humane portrait of a young man''s belated coming-of-age, the complications of love, and the surprising ways in which the most meaningful lives often turn out to be the ones we least expected to lead.
In The Whole Five Feet, Christopher Beha turns to the great books for answers after undergoing a series of personal and family crises and learning that his grandmother had used the Harvard Classics to educate herself during the Great Depression. The result is a smart, big-hearted, and inspirational mix of memoir and intellectual excursion that "deftly illustrates how books can save one's life" (Helen Schulman).
In The Whole Five Feet, Christopher Beha turns to the great books for answers after undergoing a series of personal and family crises and learning that his grandmother had used the Harvard Classics to educate herself during the Great Depression. The result is a smart, big-hearted, and inspirational mix of memoir and intellectual excursion that deftly illustrates how books can save one’s life” (Helen Schulman).
What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?Twenty-five years ago, celebrated author Christopher Beha gave up on God. After reading 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 and 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 leads him to the surprising conclusion that faith preserves the best of both traditions while offering a complete and coherent picture of reality.This deeply personal yet universal investigation delves into suffering, mortality and ultimate meaning, calling readers to take up these questions for themselves.Ebury Vine: The Home Of Christian Living. Drawing on the deep roots of Christianity to cultivate curious minds and inspire faith-informed growth.