Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved

The author was dealt a difficult test, and ever since then the theology professor Kate Bowler has been seriously studying the questions: How do you comfort yourself in hard moments of life? And how do you live when every source of comfort has already run dry?

When your life is about to be cut short, it’s hard to keep faith in higher justice and goodness. At that moment, all the tools of positive thinking get thrown into the trash, and the sources of comfort offered by religion start to dry up. The author asks: what does it mean to die in a society that insists that everything happens for a reason? With this audiobook, you’ll find support in yourself and discover the answer—where it’s never been customary to look.

Kate Bowler is a professor at the Duke Divinity School. She studied the “prosperity gospel,” which sees luck as God’s blessing and misfortune as a sign of God’s disapproval. At thirty-five, everything in her life points to “blessing.” She’s thriving at work, married to her high-school sweetheart, and joyful about each day with her newborn son.

Then she’s diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer.

The prospect of her soon-to-come death makes Kate realize: she has always lived with the belief that she can control her destiny through the power of will. If you “can’t handle it” and give in to illness or misfortune, you’re a loser. And now Kate is gravely ill, and no amount of positive thinking will shrink her tumor. She wonders: what does it mean to die in a society that insists everything happens for a reason? She loses that certainty only to discover that without it, life is hard—but beautiful, like never before.

Open, funny, dark, and wise, Kate Bowler deeply involves the reader in her life, filling her book with a colorful, often humorous entourage of friends, church preachers, relatives, and doctors. What you have before you are Kate’s irreverent, hard-won observations about death—and about how it taught her to live.

“Just remember: if cancer, or divorce, or any tragedy in the world doesn’t kill you, then people’s good intentions will definitely manage it.” — Kate Bowler.