There’s a particular kind of pressure that creeps in when we start measuring our lives—where we thought we’d be by now, who we imagined we’d become, how things were supposed to feel. The instinct is to fix it. Optimize it. Get moving.

But what if the invitation is something else?

Kate Bowler sits down with writer and speaker Suleika Jaouad (Between Two Kingdoms, The Book of Alchemy) for a conversation about living inside unresolved questions—especially the ones that ache. Together, they talk about ambition and exhaustion, chronic illness and uncertainty, and the quiet shifts that happen when nothing seems to change.

They explore the tension between momentum and meaning, the limits of self-improvement, and what it looks like to keep going without pretending everything is fixable.

SHOW NOTES

• Suleika Jaouad’s Isolation Journals (Substack)

• Between Two Kingdoms — Suleika Jaouad

• The Book of Alchemy — Suleika Jaouad

• Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway

• Watch the live conversation on YouTube

• Join Kate Bowler on Substack for the season of Lent: katebowler.substack.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What if Lent isn’t about giving something up, but about learning how to sit with what’s already gone? In this episode, Kate talks with poet, priest, and theologian Malcolm Guite about the kind of faith that can hold contradiction—the yes and the no, belief and doubt, beauty and sorrow. Malcolm, a Life Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge and author of Sounding the Seasons and Lifting the Veil, reflects on prayer as attention, poetry as a language spacious enough for ambivalence, and why faith might need less forced resolution and more honesty.

SHOW NOTES

• Sounding the Seasons by Malcolm Guite

• Lifting the Veil by Malcolm Guite

• Seamus Heaney, Station Island

• George Herbert, “Prayer”

• Gerard Manley Hopkins, the “terrible sonnets” (including “No worst, there is none”) and The Wreck of the Deutschland

• T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

• C.S. Lewis, “Blue Spells and Flowered Spheres”

• Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway

• Watch the live conversation on YouTube

• Join Kate Bowler on Substack for the season of Lent: katebowler.substack.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We live in a world that wants life to be fair. Work hard, make good choices, believe the right things—and things should turn out okay. But what happens when they don’t? In this live conversation, Kate talks with sociologist Mark Rank, author of The Random Factor, about the role of chance in our lives. From the lottery of birth to the timing of a missed phone call, Mark’s research shows how much of what we call success—or failure—comes down to forces we never chose.

SHOW NOTES:

• Mark Rank, The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World Around Us

• Mark Rank – Washington University in St. Louis

• Christian Tomasetti et al., research on random mutations and cancer risk (Johns Hopkins)

• Every Cure (founded by David Fajgenbaum)

• Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway

• Watch the live conversation on YouTube

• Join Kate Bowler on Substack for the season of Lent: katebowler.substack.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kate Bowler invites two of her sharpest friends—Ross Douthat and Molly Worthen—to help her make sense of the current American religious landscape: why the long “decline” story may be shifting, why religious curiosity is popping up in unexpected places, and why the loudest forms of Christianity often feel more online, more political, and more embarrassing. Together they sort through what people mean by “Christian nationalism,” how much of it is symbolism versus policy, what weak institutions and internet incentives are doing to faith, and what still gives them hope for the church.

SHOW NOTES

• Ross Douthat
  • Bad Religion
  • Believe
  • The Deep Places
• Molly Worthen
  • Apostles of Reason
  • Spellbound

• Pre-order Joyful Anyway by Kate Bowler

• Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway

• Watch the live conversation on YouTube

• Join Kate Bowler on Substack for the season of Lent: katebowler.substack.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What does it mean to live well when danger, loss, and grief are never far away?

Kate Bowler talks with theologian, pastor, and writer Patrik Hagman, whose life has been shaped by profound loss—including the death of his father, his young son, and later his wife. Raised in Finland and now living in Sweden, Patrik brings a distinctly Nordic perspective on happiness—not as constant joy or self-optimization, but as contentment, trust, and gratitude that survives close proximity to fragility.

This is a conversation about living with fewer explanations and more honesty. About faith that refuses easy answers. About the strange clarity that comes when life gets very small and very bright at the same time. And about learning to be less surprised by tragedy—and more surprised by goodness.

If you’re trying to hold grief and gratitude at once, this episode is for you.

SHOW NOTES

• Babettes Kulturhus (Linköping, Sweden) – community space for conversation, fika, and culture

• Stanley Hauerwas – theologian often referenced in the conversation

• Patrik Hagman – theologian, pastor, writer, and translator of Stanley Hauerwas’s work

• Pre-order Joyful Anyway by Kate Bowler

• Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway

• Watch the live conversation on YouTube

• Join Kate Bowler on Substack for the season of Lent: katebowler.substack.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When many people hear the word Christian today, it comes with a lot of baggage—power, certainty, exclusion, and culture-war posturing. But there are still people of faith whose lives look nothing like that. People whose beliefs show up as love. Patient, persistent, deeply practical love.

Bishop Michael Curry is one of those people. A priest, pastor, and former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Bishop Curry has spent a lifetime reminding people that Christianity is not an argument to win or an identity to defend—it’s a practice of love.

Recorded in front of a room full of pastors, this conversation is a kind of holy pep talk for anyone who feels worn down by a fractured, exhausting world.

Show notes:

• Pre-order Joyful Anyway by Kate Bowler

• Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway

• Watch the live conversation on YouTube

• Kate Bowler on Substack: katebowler.substack.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What do we do when the world feels unbearably heavy—and no one is coming to save us?

To kick off Season 16 of Everything Happens, Kate Bowler sits down live with beloved author and truth-teller Anne Lamott for a luminous, funny, and deeply honest conversation about shame, joy, faith, aging, love, and what it means to keep showing up anyway.

Recorded in front of a packed house at the historic Carolina Theatre in Durham, Kate and Anne talk about the shame that follows us from childhood, the relief of putting down our armor, and the small, ordinary acts of love that still matter. This is a conversation for anyone who feels tender, overwhelmed, skeptical of easy answers—and still hungry for hope.

Show notes:

• Anne Lamott on Substack

• Pre-order Joyful Anyway by Kate Bowler

• Tour dates & tickets: katebowler.com/joyfulanyway

• Watch the live conversation on YouTube

• Kate Bowler on Substack: katebowler.substack.com

• Anne Lamott

  • Bird by Bird

  • Operating Instructions

  • Traveling Mercies

  • Good Writing (with Neil Allen)

• Maggie Smith, "Good Bones"

• Naomi Shihab Nye, “Gate A-4”

• William Blake, “We are here to learn to endure the beams of love”

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How do we stay soft in a world that has taught us to be tough? Actress Minka Kelly is known for her roles as Lyla Garrity on Friday Night Lights or as Samantha in HBO’s Euphoria. Despite her fame on the big screen, one might not realize the chaos that surrounded her childhood. Being raised by a single mom who worked as a stripper and struggled with addiction, Minka had to learn how to take care of herself and the adults around her, and, eventually, to forgive her mom.

In this tender conversation, Kate and Minka discuss:

• How we can be built from the outside in through our friendships and how our friends become our chosen family
• How anger tells us that a boundary has been crossed
• The unfinished ways people love us—reconciling our complicated childhoods with the love we feel for each another
• How Minka has processed her difficult childhood through a lens of love and grace
• The way Minka’s mom was changed by her cancer diagnosis, and how once they found their way to one another again, there could never, ever be enough time

CW: colon cancer, death of a parent, brief mentions of abuse and neglect

Looking for the transcript or show notes? Click here.

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful.

This episode originally aired May 2023.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.