For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about how Kate Bowler.
In 2015 at age 35, Kate Bowler, a historian of religion and assistant professor at Duke Divinity School, was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. Facing the prospect that the life she’d worked to build — a prestigious education, promising academic career, husband and young son — could end, painfully, in a matter of months, Bowler felt profoundly ill-equipped to make sense of her own and others’ response to her new reality. “One of the weirder parts about an advanced cancer diagnosis is you’re half terrified and half extremely bored,” Bowler says. “I found myself with a lot of time to think, and I was overwhelmed almost right away at how thin the cultural scripts were around what I was supposed to say. It seemed really obvious that I was supposed to say that I was grateful for the lessons that I learned. When you think your life’s going to end, you’re trying to sum it up, but it was the fact that people wanted to sum it up for me that was not only emotionally devastating, but also intellectually exasperating.”
Bowler found that neither her academic expertise — she’d recently published Blessed*, *a history of American “prosperity gospel” megachurches — nor her own religious faith had fully prepared her for the experience. She began to write about her conundrum — first for herself (“just me crying into my laptop”), then in a New York Times op-ed, and then in a memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved, published in 2018.