Everything Happens with Kate Bowler

Everything Happens with Kate Bowler

Are you living your best life now? Not always? This is a podcast for you. Duke Professor Kate Bowler is an expert in the stories we tell about success and failure, suffering and happiness. She had Stage IV cancer. Then she didn’t. And since then, all she wants to do is talk to funny and wise people about how to live with the knowledge that, well, everything happens. Find her online at @katecbowler. Sales and Distribution by Lemonada Media https://lemonadamedia.com/

Episodes

April 1, 2025 38 mins

What happens when a journalist-turned-seminarian finds God in a pile of rotting vegetables? You get Jeff Chu—writer, pastor, and accidental theologian of compost.

In this tender and funny conversation, Jeff and Kate talk about what it means to be changed—by grief, by love, by the kind of calling that makes zero practical sense. They talk about complicated families, appropriate smallness, and what it means to belong to o...

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What does it mean to live alongside people you don’t agree with? And love them anyway? Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian, and conflict mediator from Ireland, where belonging has always been complicated and peace is fragile at best. In this conversation, Kate and Pádraig explore what it takes to live together in the midst of disagreement—the beauty, the cost, and the mes...

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March 18, 2025 37 mins

We all carry stories. Some smooth over the past, making things easier to bear. Others—the truer ones—break us open. Amy Griffin knows what it’s like to hold a secret so tightly, it starts to define you. As a child, she was sexually assaulted by a teacher—a painful truth she buried for years. But eventually, staying silent became harder than telling the truth. So what happens when the person who spends all th...

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What happens when someone believes in you–before you’re even ready to believe in yourself? In this powerful conversation, Kate sits down with legendary basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K) to talk about trust, leadership, and the important work of calling out greatness in others. From his storied career at Duke to coaching Team USA, Coach K shares what he has learned about the power of ho...

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Lent is here—the season we stop pretending we’re fine and admit that life is…a lot. It’s forty days of naming what’s fragile, walking toward the hard truths, and resisting the urge to skip straight to the happy ending.

In this special Ask Kate Anything episode, Kate answers your biggest, messiest questions: How do we stay soft in a brutal world? How do we practice Lent when life is already exhausting?...

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February 25, 2025 42 mins

Loneliness is more than just a feeling—it shapes how we see ourselves and the world around us. It can make us withdraw, hesitate to reach out, or convince us that connection is for other people. But Dr. Vivek Murthy has spent years reminding us of what is most true: we are meant to hold each other up.

As U.S. Surgeon General (twice!), Vivek confronted some of the biggest public health challenges of o...

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February 11, 2025 48 mins

Scripture can become a weapon in the hands of the ultra-certain. As if every pain or suffering is part of “God’s divine plan.” So how should we understand and apply the Bible to our real lives with our real-life problems? 

NT Wright, a New Testament scholar, is a trusted expert to help us understand what truths resound across time and circumstance and which don’t. In this conversation, Kate and Tom dig ...

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February 4, 2025 33 mins

Everything is in flux. Nothing is the same anymore. How do we live amid all of this uncertainty? Well, psychologist and bestselling author Adam Grant believes we may have to do some re-thinking. In this episode, Kate and Adam speak about the courage it takes to think again about things that we once felt so certain about, how “imposter syndrome” might be a good instinct, and how we all need friends who challenge us (even...

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January 28, 2025 29 mins

We have thick cultural scripts for what is deemed inspirational and it usually goes like this: You can do it. Never give up. Everything you need is inside of you today. But what do you really need to hear when life is coming apart? Morgan Harper Nichols is someone whose words of encouragement gently lift our chins toward hope. In this episode, Kate and Morgan discuss how important it is to reflect truth and hope and beauty back to ...

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January 21, 2025 39 mins

In a world that constantly demands more—more work, more achievement, more hustle—how do we learn to pause? Kate sits down with her sister Maria Bowler, a writer, creativity coach, and spiritual director, to talk about the pressures of the “producer self,” that voice inside us all that equates our worth with what we do, fix, or achieve.

This conversation is an invitation to live diff...

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January 14, 2025 40 mins

At the core of nursing is the ability to love a stranger, to care indiscriminately. Christie Watson was a nurse in the UK for 20 years before she began teaching nurses. But when COVID-19 hit, she knew she needed to stand with her colleagues. So she put on her scrubs once again. In this moving conversation, Kate and Christie discuss the cost of COVID on healthcare workers, chaplains, and those who can’t be by their loved ones&...

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December 31, 2024 44 mins

Does life ever feel like an endless to-do list? Like if you could just wake up tomorrow with a little more discipline, you’d finally master your schedule, achieve balance, and feel… enough

On today's episode, Oliver Burkeman (bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals) and Kate unravel some of the beautiful lies we cling to about time and control, the fantasy...

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Kate and Kelly Corrigan (Kelly Corrigan Wonders) wrap up the year with a heart-to-heart about the ups, downs, and everything in between. From the thrill of unexpected friendships to the tenderness of saying goodbye to loved ones, they reflect on the beauty and complexity of it all. Along the way, they share stories of resilience, connection, and the ways we find light—even in the darkest moments. Thi...

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It's that time of year—reflection season, where the "happy" and "crappy" moments rise to the surface. Kate and Kelly Corrigan (Kelly Corrigan Wonders) dive headfirst into the messiness of life: chronic struggles that won’t budge, the ache of missing loved ones, and the tension of unmet expectations. Along the way, they wrestle with the unyielding pressure to optimize everything (thanks, wellnes...

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December 10, 2024 57 mins

Writer and poet Safiya Sinclair describes her childhood growing up in a Rasta family in Montego Bay, Jamaica. In this live conversation, Kate and Safiya explore what it is like growing up in more fundamental families, with worldviews we didn’t get to pick, and how—through it all—we become ourselves…somehow. 

In this conversation, Kate and Safiya discuss:

  • The intertwining of p...

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December 3, 2024 14 mins

It’s the most wonderful time of the year here at Everything Happens. And you're invited to join along.

Advent is a season that leads us up to Christmas. And it is all about living with eyes wide open—seeing the world as it is, with all its cracks and flaws, and still holding on to the hope that everything wrong will one day be made right.

And if that sounds like your sort of thing, we made a fr...

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Today’s conversation is dedicated to the many loves that make up our lives—especially that of our friends. Dolly Alderton is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling writer and memoirist. She recognizes the great gift of the friends who have walked with her through many seasons of life—all the highs and lows and inbetweens. 

In this conversation, Kate and Dolly discuss:

  1. ...

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November 19, 2024 38 mins

How do you stay close to someone whose pain you can’t fix, whose questions you can’t answer? In this episode, Kate sits down with her dear friend, the Rev. Dr. Sam Wells, a longtime advocate of “being with,” a theology that goes beyond advice and into the sacred space of simply staying. Sam–vicar at London’s St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, an astonishingly wise thinker, and one of Kate’s favorite...

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There are some realities we can never get over. And yet, we keep living. How do we do that well? Wilma Derksen writes and speaks on the topics of victimization and criminal justice. Her wisdom is hardwon. In the mid-80s, Wilma’s daughter, Candace, was murdered. Their family’s response to this tragedy has inspired so many people…and you’ll soon see why.

In this conversation, Ka...

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This week we're introducing you to a show we love called A Slight Change of Plans with Dr. Maya Shankar. Kate was actually a guest on the show, where she joined to talk about how her entire belief system was thrown into question when she was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer at age 35. 

If you want to hear more conversations like this one, listen to A Slight Change of Plans wherever you get your podcasts. Plus, the show has new episod...

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