![]() ![]() She also hosts a podcast, Everything Happens, where she explores how to speak about suffering. While never considering herself a believer in the prosperity gospel, this experience made her realize how deeply engrained the idea of a divine reward system is in American mentalities.īowler chronicles her experience of navigating intense suffering and the people who try to explain it in her New York Times bestselling memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved (Random House). Then she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. By any prosperity preacher’s standards, she was blessed. If your faith isn’t strong enough, according to this mindset, then you deserve the bad things that befall you.Īt age 35, Bowler, now an associate professor at Duke Divinity School, had landed a tenure-track teaching position, married, and given birth to a son. Over time, she discovered that the church preached a message of providence popular everywhere and among almost every demographic.īowler devoted years to extensive research across the United States and Canada on what she would come to learn was called the American prosperity gospel-the idea that you will have abundant health, wealth, and happiness if you put the right kind of faith in God. When a megachurch popped up on the outskirts of Kate Bowler’s town, she didn’t understand why her friends were drawn to its worship. ![]()
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