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Big Books & Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller
Kerri Miller and Kelly Gordon

Kate Bowler on how to be fully, imperfectly, gloriously human

A side-by-side photo of a book cover and the author.
Kate Bowler is an associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School, a wife, a mother and a woman living with stage 4 cancer. Her latest book is “No Cure for Being Human.”
Book jacket courtesy of the publisher | Photo by Gabrielle Touchette

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The holidays can feel like one long exercise in anticipation. Presents, time with family, relaxation — it’s all just out there, waiting to be grasped.

But what happens when anticipation turns into apprehension — when the life you hoped for is put on hold, maybe indefinitely?

Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of better-best choices, only to find that she was stuck in a cancerous body at age 35. In her new, instant New York Times bestselling book, “No Cure for Being Human,” Bowler searches for a way forward as a contrast to the often-absurd self-help industry, which offers exhausting positivity, trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn and out-perform our humanness.

With humor and unflinching honesty, she grapples with her cancer diagnosis, her ambition and her faith and searches for some kind of peace with her limitations in a culture that says that anything is possible.

Bowler talks with host Kerri Miller about her book, her life today and how hope is better than anticipation.

Guest:

  • Kate Bowler is an author and a historian. Her new book is “No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear).”

Use the audio player above to listen to their conversation.

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