One minute I’m laughing with Kate Bowler, the next I’m quiet. That’s the effect she has—a sharp observer of life’s contradictions, able to name both the absurd and the sacred in the same breath.
She grew up in a Mennonite megachurch in Winnipeg—an unlikely mix of pacifism and spectacle. She now teaches at Duke Divinity School, where she researches how millions of American Christians came to see wealth, health, and success as signs of divine favour. And just as she was doing her doctoral work on the prosperity gospel, she was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer.
That collision—between the gospel of self-improvement and the reality of suffering—became the heart of her book Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved. It’s not a book of answers. It’s a book of truth. She names the losses, the false hopes, the desperate efforts to make life add up. And she gently invites us to let go of certainty and choose honesty instead.
What makes her voice so needed is that she doesn’t let go of joy. When things fell apart, she went on a road trip to visit the world’s largest and smallest statues—anything funny, odd, or beautiful—just to feel something again. She reminds us that play isn’t childish. It’s a way back to wonder. Creativity isn’t a luxury. It’s how we survive.
Dinner with Kate would be both light and deep. There would be laughter, maybe even a toast to all the lives we didn’t choose. And a blessing. Always a blessing. Not because it fixes anything. But because it names what is.
In church, people were always talking about blessing.
We said it in prayer groups,
in hospital rooms,
over job offers and babies
and homes with hardwood floors.
I read Kate Bowler,
who was told she’d die young
while studying people who believed they wouldn’t.
She wrote that we love lies
like “Everything happens for a reason,”
and wrote it down anyway.
She started collecting small things—
roadside attractions,
a statue of the world’s biggest mushroom.
Not because they cured anything,
but because they made her laugh.
And laughing felt like proof
that something tender still flickered
underneath all the wreckage.
Her blessings are like poems—
for the anxious, the disappointed,
the ones who got the life they didn’t ask for.
She said beauty doesn’t fix it.
But maybe it helps us become.
Not better.
Just more human.
The Afterword 
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