Everything Happens for a Reason

Kate Bowler, a Duke Divinity School professor with a modest Christian childhood, specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a belief that wealth is a favor from God and tragedy is a sign of God's disapproval. Everything in her life, at the age of thirty-five, seemed to point toward "blessed." She is doing well at work, married to her high school sweetheart, and enjoying life with her newborn kid.

Then she is told she has stage IV colon cancer.

Kate realizes that she has been silently adhering to the prosperity gospel, living with the notion that she can alter the form of her life with "a surge of determination." Even as it glorifies the American can-do mentality, this style of Christianity indicates that if you "can't do" and succumb to disease or disaster, you are a failure. Kate is very ill, and no amount of optimistic thinking will make her tumors shrink. What does it mean to die in a society that believes everything occurs for a reason, she wonders? Kate is stripped of her certainty, only to learn that without it, life is difficult yet lovely in ways she has never experienced before.

Kate Bowler draws the reader completely into her life, which she populates warmly with a colorful, often comic retinue of friends, mega-church preachers, relatives, and doctors. Everything Happens for a Reason narrates her narrative, sharing her irreverent, hard-won opinions on death and the lessons it has taught her about living.

Author: Kate Bowler

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Happens-Reason-Other-Loved/dp/0399592083/

Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 2838 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #5,254 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

#2 in Colorectal Cancer (Books)

#5 in Christian Death & Grief

#18 in Medical Professional Biographies