Everything Happens with Kate Bowler
Everything Happens Studios
Are 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.
Sales and Distribution by Lemonada Media https://lemonadamedia.com/
Sales and Distribution by Lemonada Media https://lemonadamedia.com/
Episodes
Mentioned books
May 12, 2026 • 32min
Listen Again: Everyone’s From Somewhere with Erin & Ben Napier
Erin Napier, designer and TV host who renovates homes in Laurel, Mississippi. Ben Napier, woodworker and small-business builder who helps revive his hometown. They chat about making a home where you grew up. They talk about community revitalization, necessity-driven creativity, the value of third places, and the importance of talking to strangers.
9 snips
Apr 28, 2026 • 43min
Doubt, Depth, and the Future of Belief with Tomáš Halík
Tomáš Halík, a Czech Catholic priest and theologian who ministered in secret under communism, reflects on faith formed under surveillance. He discusses doubt as a spiritual practice. He talks about silence, suffering, and why going deeper rather than louder matters. He connects historical pressures to today’s political and religious shifts.
Apr 21, 2026 • 51min
How to Love the World Anyway with Nadia Bolz-Weber and Sarah Bessey
Sarah Bessey, writer and co-founder of Evolving Faith, brings honest faith conversation and community-building. Nadia Bolz-Weber, Lutheran pastor and founder of House for All Sinners and Saints, offers candid pastoral reflection. They talk about cozy faith practices like knitting and communal singing. They explore small acts of love, returning to church rituals, and choosing to keep loving the world amid despair.
Apr 14, 2026 • 57min
Joy, Absurdity, and the Weird Ways We Survive with Rhett McLaughlin and Jenny Lawson
Rhett McLaughlin, entertainer and co-founder of Rhett & Link, musician and creator of scheduled silliness. Jenny Lawson, writer and irreverent humorist who writes candidly about mental illness and pain. They trade taxidermy tales, childhood oddities, and how anxiety, faith shifts, and deliberate absurdity become survival tools. Expect stories of staged experiments, medical weirdness, and finding connection through ridiculous small yeses.
8 snips
Apr 7, 2026 • 10min
Joyful Anyway (Yes, Even Now)
A reflection on what joy looks like when life feels fractured and tiring. A critique of the happiness industry and its promises of optimization. Honest takes on inevitabilities like illness and grief alongside surprising pockets of joy. A reading from a new book and an argument for a steadier, sturdier kind of joy that can coexist with sorrow.
Mar 31, 2026 • 51min
The Strange Gift of Joy with Rowan Williams
Rowan Williams, theologian, poet, and former Archbishop of Canterbury, reflects on joy that can coexist with sorrow. He explores how longing, grief, music, gratitude, and surprising delight live alongside pain. Conversations range from poetic readings to practical practices that open space for unexpected joy.
Mar 24, 2026 • 38min
Living the Questions (Without Fixing Yourself) with Suleika Jaouad
Suleika Jaouad, writer and speaker who chronicles illness and recovery, joins to wrestle with living in unresolved questions. They explore ambition versus exhaustion, chronic illness and the limits of self-improvement. The conversation highlights quiet shifts, refusing the waiting room of life, and finding small joys without pretending everything can be fixed.
18 snips
Mar 17, 2026 • 37min
What If Prayer Isn’t What You Think It Is? with Malcolm Guite
Malcolm Guite, poet, Anglican priest, and theologian, offers brief reflection on prayer as attention and poetry as a language for ambivalence. He traces how poems taught him to pray and how imagination, liturgy, and seasons shape spiritual rhythm. The conversation explores depression, creative recovery, and why faith can hold contradiction without forced resolution.
49 snips
Mar 10, 2026 • 49min
The Randomness of Everything with Mark Rank
Mark Rank, sociologist and author of The Random Factor, studies how luck and chance shape lives. He explores the lottery of birth, lifetime risk of poverty, and how timing and random events alter outcomes. The conversation examines meritocracy myths, why societies differ in social safety nets, and virtues that come from accepting randomness.
27 snips
Mar 3, 2026 • 50min
The New Shape of American Religion with Ross Douthat and Molly Worthen
Molly Worthen, historian of American evangelicalism, and Ross Douthat, NYT columnist on religion and culture, join the conversation. They explore why the long narrative of religious decline may be shifting. They discuss rising spiritual curiosity among young people, the tension between online performative Christianity and parish-based renewal, and how Christian nationalism shows up as symbolism versus policy.
