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  1. Christian Health & Wellbeing/
  2. Death, Suffering and Consolation

Everything Happens for a Reason

And Other Lies I've Loved

  • Hardback
  • 208 pages
  • Publisher: SPCK Publishing
  • 12.9 x 19.8 x 2.1 cm

£15.11

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For anyone dealing with profound misfortune

This story of battling cancer takes a deeply-personal look at the question of meaning and reason

You'll find life lessons to take with you, and a new way to see through personal disaster

It's the question that has, for many, muddied the waters of Christianity, but this account of real tragedy and illness sheds much-needed light through the clouds of misfortune.
Anna Hockley

Anna Hockley

Eden Christian Books Specialist

Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specialises in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God's disapproval. At thirty-five, everything in her life seems to point toward "blessing." She is thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loves life with her newborn son.

Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer.

The prospect of her own mortality forces Kate to realise that she has been tacitly subscribing to the prosperity gospel, living with the conviction that she can control the shape of her life with "a surge of determination." Even as this type of Christianity celebrates the American can-do spirit, it implies that if you "can't do" and succumb to illness or misfortune, you are a failure. Kate is very sick, and no amount of positive thinking will shrink her tumours. What does it mean to die, she wonders, in a society that insists everything happens for a reason? Kate is stripped of this certainty only to discover that without it, life is hard but beautiful in a way it never has been before.

Frank and funny, dark and wise, Kate Bowler pulls the reader deeply into her life in an account she populates affectionately with a colourful, often hilarious retinue of friends, mega-church preachers, relatives, and doctors. Everything Happens for a Reason tells her story, offering up her irreverent, hard-won observations on dying and the ways it has taught her to live.

Everything Happens for a Reason and Peg and the Pumice Stone
Peg and the Pumice StoneEverything Happens for a Reason
  • Author

    Kate Bowler

  • Book Format

    Hardback

  • Publisher

    SPCK Publishing

  • Published

    February 2018

  • Weight

    130g

  • Page Count

    208

  • Dimensions

    12.9 x 19.8 x 2.1 cm

  • ISBN

    9780281079285

  • ISBN-10

    0281079285

  • Eden Code

    4548947

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