Why Good Enough is More Than Enough with Kate Bowler
My brilliant guest today, Kate Bowler, is way ahead of us on the journey to understand that we don’t control much of what happens in our life, and yet there is still hope. Stunned with a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis, she brought all of us who follow her into the complexity of challenging the everything happens for a reason myth.
Kate has opened wide the conversation, accompanied by full out permission to explore our humanity – the finiteness of it, the rough edges to it, the suffering and beauty, the hard and the good of it all. Do I also love her because she is Canadian – and a prairie girl from the west, as I am? Absolutely!
In Kate Bowler’s bestselling memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason, readers witnessed the ways she, as a divinity-school professor and young mother, reckoned with a Stage IV cancer diagnosis; in her instant New York Times bestseller and follow-up memoir, No Cure for Being Human, she unflinchingly and winsomely unpacks the ways that life becomes both hard and beautiful when we abandon certainty and the illusion of control in our lives. Now, in their first-ever devotional book, Kate Bowler and co-author Jessica Richie offer 40ish short spiritual reflections on how we can make sense of life not as a pursuit of endless progress but as a chronic condition.
We can rest in the encouragement to strive for what is possible today — while recognizing that though we are finite, the life in front of us can be beautiful.
Kate Bowler, PhD is a New York Times bestselling author, podcast host, and a professor at Duke University. She studies the cultural stories we tell ourselves about success, suffering, and whether (or not) we’re capable of change. She is the author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel and The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities. After being unexpectedly diagnosed with Stage IV cancer at age 35, she penned the New York Times bestselling memoir, the New York Times bestselling memoir Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved) and her latest, No Cure For Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear). Kate hosts the Everything Happens podcast where, in warm, insightful, often funny conversations, she talks with people like Malcolm Gladwell and Anne Lamott about what they’ve learned in difficult times. She lives in Durham, North Carolina with her family and continues to teach do-gooders at Duke Divinity School.
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