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.
LISTEN TO NEW EPISODES OF EVERYTHING HAPPENS EVERY TUESDAY.
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Everybody Has Something
Writer Mary Laura Philpott had all the regular kind of parental worries until her teenage son had his first seizure. She had to learn to balance her fear alongside her love all the while recognizing that everyone has something they are dealing with.
A Good Funeral
Thomas Lynch is an essayist, poet, and funeral director in Milford, Michigan, where he has served since 1974 when he took over the trade from his father. Thomas speaks honestly about life and death and mortality from what he’s learned, standing so close to the edge.
When Success Isn’t Success
Arthur Brooks was a professional musician and spent his twenties touring all over the world. Until one day, he stopped being able to hit the notes. He had to reinvent himself entirely, and wonder… what does happiness look like after I lose the career I had worked so hard for?
Wrestling With the Faith We Love
Many of us miss the churches of our childhood and are trying to figure out what pieces of our faith to keep and which to leave behind. My guest today knows that better than anyone. Randall Balmer is a historian of American religion at Dartmouth College, THE expert of American evangelicalism, and a pastor’s kid (PK!) of a fundamentalist preacher.
Showing Your Scars
Ibram Kendi and Kate Bowler have more in common than they would have liked. Historians and professors. Parents of young kids. Diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer at age 35. No history of the disease in their families.
Suspicious of Joy
In this special episode, Kate visited the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, at Lambeth Palace in London.
Survival of the Kindest
How is it that joy and pain seem to coexist at once? Susan Cain (author of the bestseller Quiet) explores this question in her new book, Bittersweet.
Embracing the Complexity of Pain
When a random weight-lifting accident left cardiologist Dr. Haider Warraich in chronic pain, he went from being a physician to being a patient in one moment. His experience of chronic pain gives him a hardwon insight as he reexamines how we understand and treat pain.
Remaking Home
What do we do when our families are sources of pain, confusion, or harm? How do we (or can we) outgrow our complicated childhoods when we no longer need the defenses we created?
Mythbusting Parenting
We often have very romantic expectations about parenthood. Parenthood is about a mythical child who will be perfect in a way we haven’t quite put our finger on, and the journey to love them to teach us something reasonably easy about ourselves. But what if we are not the parents we thought we’d be? Or our kids are not the kids we thought we’d have?

Counting Your Somethings
Bestselling author Mitch Albom was at the height of his career when his favorite professor was dying. Mitch then spent his Tuesdays with Morrie—conversations that would change the trajectory of his life and career. Mitch continues to walk right up to the edge with the complicated questions around grief, loss, and hope in his books and charitable work.
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