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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Copyright: © 2024 Everything Happens Studios
Bryan Stevenson (founder of the Equal Justice Initiative) is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable among us.
In this episode, Kate and Bryan discuss:
CW: discussion of slavery, lynching, and other racist violence, death row
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No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) is now available in PAPERBACK. Order your copy, today.
Looking for some short spiritual reflections and blessings? Check out GOOD ENOUGH: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection. Available wherever books are sold.
Introducing THE LIVES WE ACTUALLY HAVE: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days (releasing February 14, 2023). Learn more, pre-order, and receive a free pennant, here.
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This episode originally aired December 2022.
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What if you started thinking really concretely about small, hard choices? That’s exactly what palliative care physicians do every day. They help us think about what we really want—knowing that we have limited time and limited resources. You’re going to love our guest today, Dr. Kathryn Mannix, palliative care physician and cognitive behavioral therapist. She offers practical steps to help people and their loved ones make sense of what limited choices they have, navigate any pain and fear they may experience, and gives the most comforting speech on what the end of a life looks like that we’ve ever heard. (I promise this is not scary at all. It is perfect.)
In this conversation, Kate and Kathryn discuss:
Why we want to keep a lid on the scary things of life
What even is palliative care
How palliative care-type thinking can help us live better
What happens to hope when facing end of life
This is a masterclass in walking right up to the edge with people, in the most gentle, compassionate way.
If you liked this episode, you’ll also love:
Sunita Puri on living in uncertainty
Rev. Tom Long on the importance of the rituals for death and dying
Watch clips from this conversation, read the full transcript, and access discussion questions by clicking here or visiting katebowler.com/podcasts.
Follow Kate on Instagram, Facebook, or X (formerly known as Twitter)—@katecbowler. Links to social pages and more available at linktr.ee/katecbowler.
This episode originally aired October 2024.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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 of hyper-efficiency, and what it might look like to embrace the limits that make us who we are.
In this conversation, Kate and Oliver discuss:
Some of the most common self-help myths that stand in our way
Why the relentless pursuit of self-improvement often leaves us feeling empty, anxious, and overwhelmed.
How embracing our limits can lead to more contentment
This is a conversation about limits—not as something to overcome, but as a doorway to something richer, deeper, and (dare I say) more human.
If you liked this episode, you’ll also love:
Katie Couric on The Courage to Try (and Wisdom to Know When to Let Go)
Susan David on Toxic Positivity
Samantha Irby on Doing My Best (Life Now)
Elizabeth Gilbert on Why Your Creativity Matters
Watch clips from this conversation, read the full transcript, and access discussion questions by clicking here.
Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful.
This episode originally aired December 2024.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
What happens when joy shows up anyway? In their third annual Happy Crappies, Kate and her dear friend Kelly Corrigan dare to name what went right in 2025 — personally, professionally, and globally — without apology or superstition. From deeply human moments that no machine could replicate, to long-overdue reckonings that reframe decades of pain, they trace the quiet ways meaning emerges when people really see one another. Along the way, they explore what joy actually is (and isn’t), why it so often arrives as a surprise, and how naming the cost of love might be one of the most hopeful acts we have.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
What happens when the things you tried to fix turn out to be forever? In their third annual Happy Crappy, Kate and her dear friend Kelly Corrigan wade into the personal, professional, and global losses of 2025. From chronic pain that refuses to budge, to families that shrink and institutions under siege, they name the hard things with tenderness, wit, and just the right amount of downer. Along the way, they ask what it means to live with limits—and whether acceptance might be its own kind of hope.
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By this point in December, love has been merchandised within an inch of its life. It jingles in ads that say if you really love someone, you should buy them a luxury car with a bow the size of a house.
But Advent tells another story. God did not arrive in a grand gesture—no skywriting, no fireworks, no leather interior with heated seats. Love slipped into a Bethlehem stable, swaddled in rags.
This is not the love we usually want. We’d prefer it to be shiny and obvious. Instead, God gives us the kind of love that chooses vulnerability. A baby who cannot even hold up his huge noggin. A terrified teenage mom. And a dad who's trying to believe this is not all a terrible mistake.
And yet—this is the love that remakes the whole world. Not quick or efficient, but slow and human. Love that needs to be changed and snuggled. Love that grows up to sit with outcasts and weep at gravesides and promise that nothing—not even death—can separate us from God.
So here we are, a few days from Christmas, and maybe the invitation is to look for love in small ways. In a text that says, “Made it home safe.” In a neighbor shoveling your walkway. Love in the God who came close, unnoticed but never unneeded.
Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!
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The TODAY Show’s Jenna Bush Hager sits down for a wide-ranging conversation with Kate Bowler. Together, they share about the importance of family and intergenerational relationships (Jenna shares such tender stories about her grandparents), how they hope to let their kids make mistakes and be met with grace, and how they both (try to) find beauty in ordinary, regular days and regular problems.
In this conversation, Kate and Jenna discuss:
Kate visited Jenna in New York City for this conversation. And Jenna is just as lovely and generous of spirit as you’d imagine.
CW: fertility issues; Alzheimer’s
Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!
This episode originally aired September 2023.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Every grocery store speaker is now officially blasting “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” And let’s be honest: sometimes it feels like a demand. The happiest Christmas music can feel like salt in the wound when life is heavy. If this season is not “merry and bright” for you, you’re not alone.
That’s why many churches will hold “Blue Christmas” services next week. It’s an American tradition that says out loud what so many feel quietly: the holidays can hurt. These services dim the lights, play gentler music, light blue candles, and make space for grief. They remind us that the story of Christmas itself is no stranger to darkness—Jesus was born into a world of oppression and fear. Joy didn’t arrive because the world was perfect; it arrived anyway.
I thought perhaps now, only halfway through the Advent season, it might be a good time to take a peek at the customs and traditions and plans that you’ve got on the calendar and see if you need to make any room for grief. Maybe the invitation of Advent is not to blast the cheeriest carol until we believe it, but to prepare room for joy by telling the truth. By letting sorrow breathe. By choosing practices that gently turn our hearts back toward joy without pretending the sadness is gone.
What might that look like for you? A quiet walk near some city Christmas lights. A playlist that mixes Bing Crosby with a hymn that actually makes you cry. A phone call to the person who understands the empty chair at your table.
Joy doesn’t demand we silence our grief. It asks us to make just enough room for God to slip in beside it. And sometimes, that tiny crack of space is all joy needs to return.
Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Life is painful. Period. But are there some aspects of our faith or our posture toward the world that can change how we experience it?
Father Richard Rohr is everyone’s favorite preacher of love. Love for each other. Love from God.
In this conversation, Kate and Richard talk about:
Together, might we all learn when to hold on and when to let go.
Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!
This episode originally aired November 2021.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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 upend all her best plans? She sings.
But not a sweet lullaby. Mary belts out a protest song:
“He has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:52–53).
This is not the peace of spa music and chamomile tea. It’s the kind of peace that rearranges the furniture of the universe. That scatters the arrogant and topples the unjust. God’s peace doesn’t politely avoid conflict; it writes the soundtrack for a revolution.
And somehow, Mary holds all of this—terror, disruption, and hope—in her own body. She sings peace into a world that did not ask for it, but desperately needs it. And here we are, centuries later, humming along too.
Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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