Author Guide · Lisanne Swart
Books Written by Kate Bowler
Kate Bowler is a Duke Divinity School historian who spent years studying America’s prosperity gospel — the belief that faith and positive thinking produce health and wealth — before being diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer at 35. Her books since then are sharp, funny, and completely unsentimental about the specific American habit of insisting every hardship has a silver lining. She writes about mortality the way a historian writes about a belief system: with real affection for the people who hold it, and real honesty about where it fails them.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Memoir · Faith · Mortality · Updated August 2026 · ~7 min read
Quick answer
Kate Bowler has written five books: the academic history Blessed (2013), her memoir Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) (2018), and three further books on faith, hardship, and living with uncertainty, including No Cure for Being Human (2021). Start with Everything Happens for a Reason if you’ve never read her.
Key facts
- Role: Associate Professor of American Religious History, Duke Divinity School
- Books written: 5, published 2013–2023
- Diagnosis: Stage IV colon cancer, diagnosed 2015 at age 35
- Best-known book: Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) (2018)
- Other work: Hosts the podcast “Everything Happens”
Why trust this list: Every book below is one I’ve read in full. Curated by Lisanne Swart.
In this guide
Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel
Bowler’s academic study traces the American prosperity gospel — the belief that enough faith, positive thinking, and giving will produce health and financial success — from its early-20th-century roots through televangelism to its modern megachurch form. Written before her cancer diagnosis, it’s a rigorous, sympathetic history rather than a takedown.
The intellectual foundation for everything she wrote afterward. Her diagnosis two years later put her, involuntarily, inside the exact belief system she’d spent years studying from the outside — which gives her later memoirs an unusual authority.
Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved)
Bowler’s memoir of her stage IV cancer diagnosis at 35, and her fury at the well-meaning platitudes — that everything happens for a reason, that this is all part of God’s plan — she’d spent her career studying and now had to actually live inside. Funny, sharp, and completely resistant to tidy spiritual conclusions.
A #1 New York Times bestseller, and the book that made her a public voice on mortality rather than just an academic one. Start here.
Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection
A collection of short, wry daily reflections co-written with her podcast producer Jessica Richie, aimed at people exhausted by the pressure to optimize every part of their lives, including their suffering.
Lower-stakes and more bite-sized than her memoirs — useful if you want her voice in small doses rather than a full narrative arc.
No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear)
A follow-up memoir written a few years into living with terminal cancer rather than in the immediate aftermath of diagnosis, grappling with what it means to keep building a life — a career, a marriage, ambitions — inside a body with an expiration date you actually know about.
Less about the shock of diagnosis and more about the strange, ongoing work of living with uncertainty long-term, which makes it a useful pairing with the more acute first memoir.
Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs & In-Betweens
A second devotional collection with Richie, offering short daily reflections that hold space for both genuinely good days and genuinely awful ones, without forcing either into a lesson.
Most useful as an ongoing companion rather than a single read — consistent with Bowler’s broader argument that not every hard day needs to resolve into meaning.
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