Everything Happens with Kate Bowler

We’ve all seen the Christmas pageants where Mary is very sweet and demure and she is wearing a tablecloth pulled from the church dining hall. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how much impossible courage Mary had from the beginning. She finds out that she is pregnant in a completely scandalous way. But what does this divinely-prepared, teenage girl do when an angel crashes into her life with an announcement guaranteed to ...

The pandemic introduced many to living with uncertainty. But for some, uncertainty has always been their norm. Actress Nikki Deloach has starred in several Hallmark Christmas movies, but her life hasn’t matched the happily-ever-after plot-lines of her characters. Nikki’s dad was diagnosed with an aggressive form of dementia and her son was diagnosed with congenital heart defects in utero… all in the same week. In...

Well, here we are. December has arrived (shudder). And with it, the great cultural sprint: decorations, office parties, and the annual anxiety dream about whether you will accidentally forget someone on your gift list (spoiler: you will). Some of you already finished your shopping over Thanksgiving and have a freezer full of perfectly labeled Christmas cookies. (Who are you?! Come to my house and fix my life!) The rest of us are st...

In this conversation, Kate and Anna discuss:

• How conversations might engender the intimacy we need to get by
• Fostering the right interpersonal and listening skills it takes to approach a difficult topic (especially when you’re feeling nervous)
• Best practices for responding to someone’s hard news
• How learning to listen might bridge differences of all kinds

What do we lose when we don’t talk about hard th...

What happens when childhood teaches you more about survival than safety? Poet and author Nikki Grimes joins Kate to talk about growing up with profound instability—and still choosing to see beauty, feel joy, and offer forgiveness. In this moving conversation, they explore memory, trauma, faith, and the small pockets of belonging that shape a life.

SHOW NOTES:

Today, we’re sharing a conversation from the More Happier podcast between Kate, Gretchen Rubin, Priya Parker, and Francis Lam. 

It’s easy to get swept up in a cycle of holidays that feels more like a relentless to-do list than a source of joy. In this Celebration Roundtable, we talk about how to embrace the holidays as opportunities for intentional connection and meaning.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy info...

Tim Shriver—educator, author, and longtime Chairman of Special Olympics—joins Kate for a tender, funny, deeply practical conversation about dignity: what changes when we decide everyone matters, how relationships (not information) do the real work, and why service is more than “being nice.” Together they trace a family story from Rosemary Kennedy to Eunice Kennedy Shriver to million...

What happens when you live on a planet where grief rewrites the language of everyday life? Kate Bowler speaks with writer and New York Times editor Sarah Wildman about her daughter Orli’s incandescent life and staggering courage while living with terminal cancer. Together they explore the limits of positivity culture, the fierce tenderness of caregiving, the sacred discomfort of truth-telling, and th...

It’s tempting to be a very serious person in a very serious world. But what if staying soft was the most loving thing we could do? In this vulnerable and playful conversation, Kate sits down with Sophie Grégoire Trudeau—mental health advocate, speaker, and writer—to talk about childhood wiring, the masks we wear, and how we begin the lifelong work of coming home to ourselves. If yo...

Loving people is a gift—and a liability. The more we love, the more there is to lose. In this hilariously honest and deeply tender conversation, Kate talks with beloved writer Catherine Newman about the strange pairing of love and fear. Together, they explore how parenting, grief, humor, and hospice care shape us into people who laugh while crying and keep showing up anyway. If you’ve ever whis...

When someone you love is in pain—but can’t say the words out loud—what can you do? Kate speaks with beloved Canadian novelist Miriam Toews (All My Puny Sorrows, Women Talking, A Truce That Is Not Peace) about the silences that shape us: the kind that settle into families, into churches, into whole communities where mental illness is unnamed and...

How do we stay hopeful in the face of despair and disillusionment—especially when politics threaten to tear us in two? Kate speaks with Parker Palmer, a writer, teacher, and activist. As you’ll hear, he has gone through seasons of deep clinical depression, and has hard-won wisdom to share with us on how to survive, how to regain a sense of agency, how to remain hopeful despite it all. 

In ...

Joy won't cure you, but it will carry you.

After surviving a stage-four cancer diagnosis, Kate Bowler knew she was supposed to be grateful. Alive. Blessed. But she still ached—for more connection, more surprise, less resentment on an ordinary day.

So she went looking for joy. Not the toxic positivity kind. Not a 5-step plan. But the type that sneaks in unexpectedly, seemingly out of nowhere. A lemur ...

Everywhere you turn, there’s something to worry about. And sometimes that buzzing hum of anxiety is trying to tell us something important—about our body, our heart, our world. In this episode, holistic psychiatrist Dr. Ellen Vora joins Kate to talk about the difference between false anxiety (the kind sparked by sleepless nights or too much caffeine) and true anxiety (the kind that whispers: something isn’t right h...

What happens when love isn’t enough to hold up a broken system?

Ai-jen Poo—award-winning organizer and executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance—joins Kate Bowler to talk about caregiving in America. Who provides it. Who’s left out. And why we need a system that treats care as the sacred, shared labor that it is.

Together they explore:

• Why more than 100 milli...

What happens when the life you were supposed to have… disappears?

Jen Hatmaker joins Kate Bowler for a conversation about faith, divorce, and the slow art of healing. After the collapse of her marriage and being pushed out of the evangelical world, Jen had to figure out how to live again—how to co-parent, pay bills, go to therapy, and mother herself after decades of being the “pastor&rsq...

There are no training manuals for this. Just a child staring up at you with cartoon eyes and an inner monologue that asks: Am I doing this right? Am I ruining them?

Kate sits down with Dr. Becky Kennedy—a clinical psychologist and creator of Good Inside—to talk about the heartbreak and hope of parenting. What does it mean to raise (or re-raise) someone with compassion and boundaries, ...

When someone you love is in pain—whether they’re sick, addicted, or falling apart—you show up. Again and again and again. You make the calls. You hold the line. You carry what you can. But what happens when love, loyalty, and devotion blur into something harder to name? When care turns into codependency, and compassion starts to erase your sense of self?

Kate sits down with best-selling a...

In this episode, Kate speaks with surgeon, writer, and public health leader Dr. Atul Gawande about the deeply human questions that surface when medicine meets its limits. What does it mean to be a good doctor when a cure isn’t possible? What do people really mean when they say they want “quality of life”?

Together, they talk about caregiving, en...