Talks & Entertainment

At this in-person event (with a virtual attendance option), proof of vaccination and masks are required. Please review our health and safety protocols here.

This program does not include a book signing. All books will include autographed bookplates.

It’s hard to give up on the feeling that the life you want is just out of reach. A beach body by summer. A dream vacation around the corner. Everyone wants to believe that they are headed toward good, better, best. But what happens when life as you know it is put on hold indefinitely?

Kate Bowler, a historian at Duke Divinity School, was thirty-five when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in 2015. The story of her struggle to understand the personal and intellectual dimensions of the American belief that all tragedies are tests of character became a New York Times bestseller, Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved).

Now that Bowler has responded to immunotherapy, she must figure out how to make a new life between CT scans. In No Cure for Being Human: (And Other Truths I Need to Hear), she grapples with her cancer diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith and searches for some semblance of peace with her limitations in a culture that says that anything is possible.

Bowler, host of the “Everything Happens” podcast, will be in conversation with David Brooks, an Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times and bestselling author of The Road to Character, The Social Animal, and Bobos in Paradise.