Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved [Hardcover]

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NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER A meditation on sense-making when theres no sense to be made, on letting go when we cant hold on, and on being unafraid even when were terrified.Lucy Kalanithi

Belongs on the shelf alongside other terrific books about this difficult subject, like Paul KalanithisWhen Breath Becomes Airand Atul GawandesBeing Mortal.Bill Gates

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYREAL SIMPLE

Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of Gods disapproval. At thirty-five, everything in her life seems to point toward blessing. She is thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loves life with her newborn son.

Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer.

The prospect of her own mortality forces Kate to realize that she has been tacitly subscribing to the prosperity gospel, living with the conviction that she can control the shape of her life with a surge of determination. Even as this type of Christianity celebrates the American can-do spirit, it implies that if you cant do and succumb to illness or misfortune, you are a failure. Kate is very sick, and no amount of positive thinking will shrink her tumors. What does it mean to die, she wonders, in a society that insists everything happens for a reason? Kate is stripped of this certainty only to discover that without it, life is hard but beautiful in a way it never has been before.

Frank and funny, dark and wise, Kate Bowler pulls the reader deeply into her life in an account she populates affectionately with a colorful, often hilarious retinue of friends, mega-church preachers, relatives, and doctors.Everything Happens for a Reasontells her story, offering up her irreverent, hard-won observations on dying and the ways it has taught her to live.

Praise forEverything Happens for a Reason

I fell hard and fast for Kate Bowler. Her writing is naked, elegant, and grippingshes like a Christian Joan Didion. I left Kates story feeling more present, more grateful, and a hell of a lot less alone. And what else is art for?Glennon Doyle, #1New York Timesbestselling author ofLove Warriorand president ofTogether Rising