Kate Bowler est née 16 juin 1980 à Londres, et a grandi dans le Dakota du Nord. Elle a obtenu son diplôme de l’université Duke en 2002 et a poursuivi ses études pour obtenir un doctorat en théologie à l’université Emory. En 2011, elle a été embauchée comme professeure adjointe de théologie à l’université Duke Divinity School, où elle enseigne actuellement en tant que professeure agrégée.
En 2015, Bowler a été diagnostiquée avec un cancer en phase terminale et a commencé à écrire sur son expérience dans un blog qui a rapidement gagné en popularité. Son livre, « Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved », publié en 2018, est basé sur ce blog et explore sa lutte contre la maladie et sa recherche de sens et de paix dans l’adversité. Le livre a été un best-seller et a été salué par la critique.
Bowler est également l’auteure de « Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel » (2013), dans lequel elle explore l’histoire et l’influence de l’évangile de la prospérité aux États-Unis, ainsi que de « Dazzle Ships: Christian Art and the Journey of Faith » (2019), un livre sur l’art chrétien et sa relation avec la foi. Elle a également écrit de nombreux articles pour des publications telles que The New York Times et The Atlantic.
SA BIOGRAPHIE
- Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (2013)
- Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved (2018)
- Dazzle Ships: Christian Art and the Journey of Faith (2019)
Autres livres
Good Enough : In Kate Bowler’s bestselling memoir Everything Happens for a Reason, readers witnessed the ways she, as a divinity-school professor and young mother, reckoned with a Stage IV cancer diagnosis; in her follow-up memoir, No Cure for Being Human, she unflinchingly and winsomely unpacked the ways that life becomes both hard and beautiful when we abandon certainty and the illusion of control in our lives. Now, in their first-ever devotional book, Kate Bowler and co-author Jessica Richie offer 40ish short spiritual reflections on how we can make sense of life not as a pursuit of endless progress but as a chronic condition. This book is a companion for when you want to stop feeling guilty that you’re not living your best life now.
Written gently and with humor, Good Enough is permission for all those who need to hear that there are some things you can fix—and some things you can’t. And it’s okay that life isn’t always better. In these gorgeously written reflections, Bowler and Richie offer fresh imagination for how truth, beauty, and meaning can be discovered amid the chaos of life. Their words celebrate kindness, honesty, and interdependence in a culture that rewards ruthless individualism and blind optimism. Ultimately, in these pages we can rest in the encouragement to strive for what is possible today—while recognizing that though we are finite, the life in front of us can be beautiful.
Everything Happens for Reason : London born Kate Bowler, a thirty-five year-old professor at the school of divinity at Duke, had finally had a baby with her childhood sweetheart when she began to feel jabbing pains in her stomach. She lost thirty pounds, guzzled antacid, and visited doctors for three months before she was finally diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer.
As Kate navigates the aftermath of her diagnosis, she pulls the reader into her life and her history – affectionately filled with a colourful retinue of friends, mega-church preachers, parents, and doctors – and shares her irreverent, laser-sharp reflections on faith, friendship, love, and death. She wonders why suffering makes her feel like a loser and explores the burden of positivity. Trying to relish the time she still has with her son and husband, she realizes she must cure her habit of ‘skipping to the end’ and planning the next move. An historian of the American Prosperity Gospel (the creed of the megachurches that promises believers a cure for tragedy, if they just want it badly enough) Kate finds that she craves these same ‘outrageous certainties’. Why is it so hard to surrender when she knows there are no spiritual guarantees?
In Everything Happens for Reason we encounter one of the talented, courageous few who – like Paul Kalanithi – can articulate the grief we feel as we contemplate our own mortality
“Kate Bowler is the only one we can trust to tell us the truth.”—Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed
It’s hard to give up on the feeling that the life you really want is just out of reach. A beach body by summer. A trip to Disneyland around the corner. A promotion on the horizon. Everyone wants to believe that they are headed toward good, better, best. But what happens when the life you hoped for is put on hold indefinitely?
Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices, until she discovered, at age 35, that her body was wracked with cancer. In No Cure for Being Human, she searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of today’s “best life now” advice industry, which insists on exhausting positivity and on trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn, and out-perform our humanness. We are, she finds, as fragile as the day we were born.
With dry wit and unflinching honesty, Kate Bowler grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with her limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. She finds that we need one another if we’re going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between—and there’s No Cure for Being Human
