Stay ConnectedAre 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.
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As Holy Week arrives, Kate talks with theologian, poet, and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams about joy that doesn’t erase sorrow. Together they explore longing, grief, music, gratitude, hope, and the strange, defiant way joy can sit right beside pain without denying what’s true.
SHOW NOTES
Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway
Watch the live conversation on YouTube
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There’s a particular kind of pressure that creeps in when we start measuring our lives—where we thought we’d be by now, who we imagined we’d become, how things were supposed to feel. The instinct is to fix it. Optimize it. Get moving.
But what if the invitation is something else?
Kate Bowler sits down with writer and speaker Suleika Jaouad (Between Two Kingdoms, The Book of Alchemy) for a conversation about living inside unresolved questions—especially the ones that ache. Together, they talk about ambition and exhaustion, chronic illness and uncertainty, and the quiet shifts that happen when nothing seems to change.
They explore the tension between momentum and meaning, the limits of self-improvement, and what it looks like to keep going without pretending everything is fixable.
SHOW NOTES
Suleika Jaouad’s Isolation Journals (Substack)
Between Two Kingdoms — Suleika Jaouad
The Book of Alchemy — Suleika Jaouad
Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway
Watch the live conversation on YouTube
Join Kate Bowler on Substack for the season of Lent: katebowler.substack.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
What if Lent isn’t about giving something up, but about learning how to sit with what’s already gone? In this episode, Kate talks with poet, priest, and theologian Malcolm Guite about the kind of faith that can hold contradiction—the yes and the no, belief and doubt, beauty and sorrow. Malcolm, a Life Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge and author of Sounding the Seasons and Lifting the Veil, reflects on prayer as attention, poetry as a language spacious enough for ambivalence, and why faith might need less forced resolution and more honesty.
SHOW NOTES
Sounding the Seasons by Malcolm Guite
Lifting the Veil by Malcolm Guite
Seamus Heaney, Station Island
George Herbert, “Prayer”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, the “terrible sonnets” (including “No worst, there is none”) and The Wreck of the Deutschland
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
C.S. Lewis, “Blue Spells and Flowered Spheres”
Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway
Watch the live conversation on YouTube
Join Kate Bowler on Substack for the season of Lent: katebowler.substack.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We live in a world that wants life to be fair. Work hard, make good choices, believe the right things—and things should turn out okay. But what happens when they don’t? In this live conversation, Kate talks with sociologist Mark Rank, author of The Random Factor, about the role of chance in our lives. From the lottery of birth to the timing of a missed phone call, Mark’s research shows how much of what we call success—or failure—comes down to forces we never chose.
SHOW NOTES:
Mark Rank, The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World Around Us
Christian Tomasetti et al., research on random mutations and cancer risk (Johns Hopkins)
Every Cure (founded by David Fajgenbaum)
Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway
Watch the live conversation on YouTube
Join Kate Bowler on Substack for the season of Lent: katebowler.substack.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Kate Bowler invites two of her sharpest friends—Ross Douthat and Molly Worthen—to help her make sense of the current American religious landscape: why the long “decline” story may be shifting, why religious curiosity is popping up in unexpected places, and why the loudest forms of Christianity often feel more online, more political, and more embarrassing. Together they sort through what people mean by “Christian nationalism,” how much of it is symbolism versus policy, what weak institutions and internet incentives are doing to faith, and what still gives them hope for the church.
SHOW NOTES
Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway
Watch the live conversation on YouTube
Join Kate Bowler on Substack for the season of Lent: katebowler.substack.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
What does it mean to live well when danger, loss, and grief are never far away?
Kate Bowler talks with theologian, pastor, and writer Patrik Hagman, whose life has been shaped by profound loss—including the death of his father, his young son, and later his wife. Raised in Finland and now living in Sweden, Patrik brings a distinctly Nordic perspective on happiness—not as constant joy or self-optimization, but as contentment, trust, and gratitude that survives close proximity to fragility.
This is a conversation about living with fewer explanations and more honesty. About faith that refuses easy answers. About the strange clarity that comes when life gets very small and very bright at the same time. And about learning to be less surprised by tragedy—and more surprised by goodness.
If you’re trying to hold grief and gratitude at once, this episode is for you.
SHOW NOTES
Babettes Kulturhus (Linköping, Sweden) – community space for conversation, fika, and culture
Stanley Hauerwas – theologian often referenced in the conversation
Patrik Hagman – theologian, pastor, writer, and translator of Stanley Hauerwas’s work
Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway
Watch the live conversation on YouTube
Join Kate Bowler on Substack for the season of Lent: katebowler.substack.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
When many people hear the word Christian today, it comes with a lot of baggage—power, certainty, exclusion, and culture-war posturing. But there are still people of faith whose lives look nothing like that. People whose beliefs show up as love. Patient, persistent, deeply practical love.
Bishop Michael Curry is one of those people. A priest, pastor, and former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Bishop Curry has spent a lifetime reminding people that Christianity is not an argument to win or an identity to defend—it’s a practice of love.
Recorded in front of a room full of pastors, this conversation is a kind of holy pep talk for anyone who feels worn down by a fractured, exhausting world.
Show notes:
Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway
Watch the live conversation on YouTube
Kate Bowler on Substack: katebowler.substack.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
What do we do when the world feels unbearably heavy—and no one is coming to save us?
To kick off Season 16 of Everything Happens, Kate Bowler sits down live with beloved author and truth-teller Anne Lamott for a luminous, funny, and deeply honest conversation about shame, joy, faith, aging, love, and what it means to keep showing up anyway.
Recorded in front of a packed house at the historic Carolina Theatre in Durham, Kate and Anne talk about the shame that follows us from childhood, the relief of putting down our armor, and the small, ordinary acts of love that still matter. This is a conversation for anyone who feels tender, overwhelmed, skeptical of easy answers—and still hungry for hope.
Show notes:
Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway
Watch the live conversation on YouTube
Kate Bowler on Substack: katebowler.substack.com
Anne Lamott
Maggie Smith, "Good Bones"
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Gate A-4”
William Blake, “We are here to learn to endure the beams of love”
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How do we stay soft in a world that has taught us to be tough? Actress Minka Kelly is known for her roles as Lyla Garrity on Friday Night Lights or as Samantha in HBO’s Euphoria. Despite her fame on the big screen, one might not realize the chaos that surrounded her childhood. Being raised by a single mom who worked as a stripper and struggled with addiction, Minka had to learn how to take care of herself and the adults around her, and, eventually, to forgive her mom.
In this tender conversation, Kate and Minka discuss:
CW: colon cancer, death of a parent, brief mentions of abuse and neglect
Looking for the transcript or show notes? Click here.
Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful.
This episode originally aired May 2023.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Author and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor is no stranger to darkness. After experiencing devastating loss, Barbara explores our culture’s pursuit of the sunny side of life. But perhaps there are things we learn in the dark that we can’t learn in the light. Kate and Barbara discuss the two halves of our lives and how to practice courage even in the scariest of circumstances.
CW: Death of parents, tongue cancer
For show notes, the transcript, and discussion questions, click here.
Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful.
This episode originally aired December 2022.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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