Debunking "Everything Happens for a Reason" with Kelly Corrigan

Everything Happens with Kate Bowler

Everything Happens Studios

Health & Fitness, Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture

4.8 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2021

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Everything Happens team is still on a bit of a summer break, but don't worry! We'll be back in August with all new episodes. We thought it might be fun to surprise you with this bonus episode. Kate spoke with her friend, the brilliant and hilarious bestselling writer Kelly Corrigan on Kelly's Podcast: Kelly Corrigan Wonders. Together, the two debunk conventional wisdom like the notion that "Everything Happens for a Reason." Kate Bowler has trouble nodding along when people say things like “Don’t put that into the universe!” and “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” But what she simply CANNOT endure is when someone assures her that “everything happens for a reason.” Her point of view is tied to two absurd truths of her life: she’s a divinity professor at Duke, and she had Stage 4 cancer. She split her time between studying how religion works and getting surgeries that move her belly button around and then recovering from them with her husband who she’s been with since she was in braces and her son, who at six, doesn’t really get why sometimes she can’t do dance parties with him. This conversation will fill you up. Guaranteed. Listen to more episodes from Kelly Corrigan Wonders. Are you following Kate on social media? Find Kate on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. Sign up for Kate's weekly email newsletters and receive free printable downloads. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello my dears, Kate here. Our team is taking a little summer break and will be back with
0:09.3	new episodes in August. Until then, I thought it might be fun to drop in a bonus episode
0:14.6	for you all. This is a conversation with someone you will just love, the hilarious and honest
0:21.4	Kelly Corrigan. You may remember her when I had her on my podcast, we talked about the
0:27.2	back-to-back grief of losing her dad and her dear friend and how to live a little more
0:32.4	gratefully. Kelly is a gorgeous writer, hosts her own show on PBS and has a beautiful podcast
0:39.8	you'll love called Kelly Corrigan Wonders. In this episode, we talk about the platitudes that
0:46.0	drive us absolutely bananas and all the reasons people give to explain why other people are suffering
0:53.2	and why they don't work. All right, I hope you like it. Enjoy.
1:01.3	Hi, this is Kelly Corrigan. I'm a writer who is woefully overdue on book number five,
1:08.3	but I've discovered that talking to smart, funny people about big ideas is way more fun than
1:16.0	being alone with another manuscript. So forgive me, random house. I couldn't help myself.
1:21.3	The question we're wondering about this month is what conventional wisdom turns out to be not
1:27.4	that wise after all and maybe even a little dangerous. So I started by snooping around on medium,
1:34.3	my go-to production partner for this series, and I was reading pieces about how all manner of things
1:41.0	can be hampered by following conventional wisdom, anything from tech innovations to true love.
1:47.0	And then I asked my newsletter, Pempals, what platitudes make you nuts? From this list, I landed on
1:55.2	what I think might be the foremost problematic maxims circulating today, which will cover one at a
2:02.7	time week by week. First up, the truly maddening, everything happens for a reason. There could be no
2:10.8	better thought partner on this one than Kate Boehler. If you haven't read her books or listen to her
2:16.3	podcast or watched her TED talk, Kate is the best-selling author, a divinity professor at Duke,
2:23.3	the mother of a very cute guy named Zach, and since 2015, is staged for colon cancer patient.
	...

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