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Do you think there's any part of us that lives on after we die?

Yes, 100%. Absolutely. Which part? The eyeballs, mostly.

They're the last to decompose. You know, there's all the stuffness of our bodies, but there's this, like,

incredible durability to how we think about the soul.

I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard, the show where cards control the conversation.

Each week, my guest answers questions about their life, pulled from a deck of cards.

They're allowed to skip one and to flip one question back on me.

My guest this week is author and professor and podcaster Kate Bowler.

Love and mystery have gotten me farther, I think, down the road than certainty did.

But I do miss certainty.

You know when something bad happens in life and people around you don't really know what to say to make it feel better.

And some of them think that the trick to fixing it is to tell you that there must be some lesson that you're supposed to learn from the bad thing.

Or that your suffering is okay because it's all part of some grand universal plan.

We all know those people and they mean well, they do.

But when your world falls apart, the last thing you want to hear is that it's all supposed to be that way.

This is the gospel of Kate Bowler.

Kate is a New York Times bestselling author, a professor at the Divinity School at Duke University,

a native of the great country of

Canada, and the host of the podcast, Everything Happens. I first met Kate in 2018 when I interviewed

her for her memoir that she had just written about dealing with a stage four cancer diagnosis

...