Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

“You’re desperate to find causality even where there is none,” says Kate Bowler. She’s a historian at Duke Divinity School and the author of the memoir Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved. And she makes us laugh, even when she’s talking about death, dying, and grief. In this episode, Bowler tells Elise Loehnen what happened after she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in her mid-thirties. She shares the moments she stopped feeling like a person, the pressure she felt to be “the best” cancer patient, to find explanations, to treat everything as a lesson that she needed to learn. She talks about how her beliefs eventually shifted. And how perhaps the biggest lesson is that it’s not always on us to figure it all out. “I was never a problem to be solved,” says Bowler. “I was just a person to be loved.”