Life is a chronic condition. The New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason asks how to go on living when the life you know changes beyond recognition.
We all know, intellectually, that our time on earth is limited. What would we change if we knew it viscerally? Kate Bowler was thirty-five when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. Now that she's responded to immunotherapy Kate has to figure out how to make a new life between CT scans. Before she got sick, she'd accepted the very American idea that life was an endless horizon of possibilities. Now she has to figure out what to do within the limits of the time she has left.
In No Cure for Being Human, Kate, hailed by Glennon Doyle as "the Christian Joan Didion," looks at the ways she has tried to wring meaning from her remaining time through anecdotes that range from the hilariously absurd--as when she attempts to rid the hospital gift shop of its copies of prosperity gospel guru Joel Osteen's Your Best Life Now to the seriously painful. Breaking down time into efficient segments--"gather round and watch how this woman can take a solitary moment and divide it into a million uses!"--trying to live in the moment, weighing the meaning of work, and learning to discover what "enough" feels like, Kate asks one of the most fundamental questions of all: How do we create meaning in our lives as we race against the clock? Kate Bowler is an associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School. She completed her undergraduate degree at Macalester College, received a master's of religion from Yale Divinity School, and a PhD at Duke University. She is the author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, the New York Times bestselling memoir Everything Happens for a Reason (and other lies I've loved), and The Preacher's Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities. She has appeared on NPR, Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, Toban, and son, Zach.
