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I love the theologian Kate Bowler's allergy to every platitude.

Her wisdom and wit about the true messy fullness of what it means to be in a human body.

Her wisdom has been hard one at a young age.

She's best known for her 2018 book, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved.

It is a poetic and powerful reflection on how she moved through learning at age 35 that she had stayed for colon cancer.

At that time, Kate was told that she would probably die very soon.

She had a husband she loved since she was 15 and they had a very young son.

I read her book again in preparation for this conversation with such admiration.

Several cathartic years later and a changed Kate in a changed world.

From the new reality in our time of living with cancer as a chronic illness,

to the telling of truths to our young as we face precarity in our collective body,

this conversation is full of the vividly whole humanity that Kate Bowler singularly embodies.

And as you'll hear, if she hadn't become a theologian, she might have been a stand-up comedian.

I'm Krista Tippett and this is on Being.

Kate Bowler is an associate professor at Duke University Divinity School.

She made an early name in her field of American Religious History with her 2013 book, Blessed,

a History of the American Prosperity Gospel.

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