Theologian and writer Dr. Kate Bowler’s most recent book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, is a New York Times Best Seller. At thirty-five, everything in her life seemed to point toward “blessing.” She was thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loved life with her newborn son. Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. What does it mean to die, she wonders, in a society that insists everything happens for a reason? She is stripped of this certainty only to discover that without it, life is hard but beautiful in a way it never has been before. Dr. Bowler is a professor of Chrisitan history at Duke Divinity and the host of the podcast, Everything Happens.
Lanecia A. Rouse Tinsley is an interdisciplinary artist that specializes in abstraction. She seeks to make the invisible landscapes within and the human condition known; using texture, form + color to speak to life upon various surfaces in ways words cannot. She is the owner and creator of LAR Art Studio as well as a graduate of Duke Divinity.
Poet Christian Wiman’s book My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, was composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant. It is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith―responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition―might look like. He is a professor of the practice of religion and literature at Yale Divinity School.