Few authors are as uniquely equipped to navigate life's beautiful, terrible contradictions as Kate Bowler. A Duke University professor with a PhD and the New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason, her academic authority is sharpened by a Stage IV cancer diagnosis. In this collection of blessings and reflections, Bowler confronts the easy promises of the self-help industry—the relentless calls to “Try harder!” or “Change your mindset.” Instead, she offers a theology of “precarity,” a term whose Latin root signifies a state “obtained by entreaty or prayer,” revealing our necessary reliance on God and neighbor. For anyone feeling overwhelmed or in pain, the book provides language for wrestling with how to be both faithful and afraid. It offers solace not through platitudes, but through the profound comfort of acknowledging our shared fragility and interdependence.
