New York Times Op-Ed: Ash Wednesday and the Burden of Living Your Beliefs, by Christopher Beha (Author, Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer (2026)):

On Ash Wednesday, I’ll join millions throughout the world in fasting, abstaining from meat and receiving ashes on my forehead, along with the reminder that I am dust, and that to dust I will return. …

[Ash Wednesday] is one of the few Catholic rituals that is truly open to anyone. Lapsed or wavering Catholics, non-Catholic Christians, non-Christian theists, and even agnostics and atheists are all welcome. You don’t even have to sit through Mass; many churches simply hand ashes out at the door. The only thing asked of recipients is an awareness of their own fallibility and a desire to repent for their mistakes.

The sense of my own imperfection and my need for help played a large role in my return to the Catholic faith about a decade ago, which is one reason the Lenten season means so much to me. To this end, I have taken since my “reversion” to marking its beginning in another way, by reading T.S. Eliot’s great poem “Ash Wednesday.”

“Because I do not hope to turn again,” the poem begins, insistently. “Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn.”

Eliot wrote “Ash Wednesday” around the time of his conversion to the Anglican faith in 1927, and I read it at this time each year in part to memorialize my own turnings, from devoted former altar boy to militant atheist and, later, from atheist back to believer. I read it also as a reminder that I might still turn again, however much I hope otherwise. As a reminder to practice what I’ve come to call “skeptical belief.” …

 I’m well aware that religion has often served as precisely that “one great truth” that people are punished for refusing to accept. But it has also served as an expression of the fundamental mystery at the heart of reality and the radical limitations of human understanding. It is a way of living with skepticism. …

[A] skeptical believer recognizes doubt as an essential component of belief, rather than its opposite. To a skeptical believer, the great mark of sincerity is the extent to which you attempt to live out your beliefs in your own life despite your own doubts, not the extent to which you silence those doubts or the doubts of others. …

One of the reasons I love Ash Wednesday is that for one day these beliefs are conspicuous to others without my having to say a word. I think I’m a better person on this day on account of that fact.

To push ahead of someone on the train, to refuse a dollar to the woman selling candy with a baby on her back, to make a snarky remark at the register about my misunderstood coffee order, all while I have ashes on my head, would announce to anyone who cared to notice the disjunction between my supposed beliefs and my life in the world.

What I try instead to do on this day is simply meet each choice I face with my fallible and limited beliefs, and respond to that choice in the way those beliefs actually commend. Then I try, on the next day and the next, to imagine I still have that mark on me, that I am constantly being called to live up to the beliefs I claim to hold, to imagine that this is the best case I can ever make for them. As a skeptic, I’ve come to think this is the only way that beliefs can ever really be proven.

But then, I could be wrong.

Christopher Beha, Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer (2026):

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.

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