![]() ![]() “He says, ‘Oh mom, let’s not waste our time,’” Bowler says. It often goes like this: As they scurry to reach the school front door before the bell rings, her son will tug on Bowler’s hand, pulling her back. These days, Bowler drops her 7-year-old off at school most mornings. “You just have to let delight and surprise fill up one of the batteries. “I find that having the opposite of pragmatism helps me,” Bowler says with a smile. She also made a pilgrimage to “the world’s largest replica of the world’s largest lighthouse.” (Turns out it’s pretty small.) She recently spent a day at sea aboard a boat, tagging sharks. In lieu of tidy formulas, Bowler herself finds solace in novel experiences, and in the absurd. She’s skeptical, too, about whether “mental mastery” is actually possible. She pushes back against the idea, drawn from Stoicism and Buddhism, of “living in the moment.” Not so easy when mortgage bills and college tuition payments loom on the horizon, she points out. “No Cure for Being Human,” which has drawn positive reviews in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews and elsewhere, deals with living “not right at the edge of the cliff, but two steps back.”īowler says she spends much of the book arguing. She faces different challenges now than at first, including learning to live with uncertainty. Her cancer, while not vanquished, is in remission. When she was first diagnosed with cancer, Bowler worried about whether she would live to see her son enter kindergarten. “Then I kept living, which was a real surprise,” she adds with a sideways smile. ![]() “Would you burn it all to the ground? Would you live on a beach? Would you stay at home and nap or do puzzles?” “Mine was like ‘What would you do if you were handed a truly terrible Stage 4 cancer diagnosis?’,” Bowler says. The moment of diagnosis, Bowler recalls, was like “the reverse of the lottery problem, ‘What would you do if you were handed a million dollars?’” Her sparkling intelligence and humor also acts as a leavening agents, lightening otherwise weighty topics. She resists bromides and formulaic responses to tragedy. “Everything Happens” became a bestseller, and the podcast now draws millions of listeners, who tune in for Bowler’s warm, lively exchanges with guests ranging from writer Anne Lamott to actor Matthew McConaughey.Ī common thread uniting all of Bowler’s projects is the search for honest language about life’s hardest moments. ![]() The same year the memoir appeared, Bowler launched a podcast, “Everything Happens with Kate Bowler,” featuring conversations with a wide range of people – ministers, actors, authors and more – about what they’ve learned in dark times. Meanwhile, Bowler also pursued a deeply personal project, her memoir “Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved),” which grapples with making sense of life after her cancer diagnosis. “It let me find a way to be myself in a situation in which I felt eclipsed.” “I wrote most of it in waiting rooms,” Bowler says. Bowler conducted interviews for the project in the cancer ward while getting chemo. “The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities” profiles pastor’s wives in evangelical megachurches. “Were my hopes too expensive? Would they cost me too much?”īowler decided to write the book. “If I won’t keep that job and I’ll die at the end of the year?” “Would it be worth the risk to spend the year writing a book that almost no one will read,” Bowler says. She had to decide whether to forge on with the project, investing further in an academic career that suddenly looked uncertain. At the time, she was at work on her second academic book. So I wanted to look at…would it be okay if our lives didn’t always add up?”įor Bowler, life stopped adding up when she was diagnosed at 35 with stage IV cancer. “In all these formulas, the assumption is that your life is going to add up. “’Be Present.’ ‘You Only Live Once.’ ‘Just Do What You Love.’ “We’re given all these formulas for how to live,” Bowler says. ![]() Kate Bowler, associate professor of the history of Christianity at Duke Divinity School and author of the new memoir “No Cure for Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear),” isn’t buying it. Just add the right ingredients - a dash of resilience, a spoonful of moxie-and your life will be perfect, an airy souffle. People often act as if life is a simple formula. ![]()
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