Kate Bowler is a Canadian academic and writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Bowler is currently an associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School. She is the author of ''Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel'' ( Oxford University Press, 2013) and ''Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I've Loved)'' ( Random House, 2018), which was a ''New York Times'' hardcover nonfiction best seller. In her podcast, ''Everything Happens'', she talks with others about their dark times and what they've learned.

Biography

Bowler was born in London, where her father was pursuing a PhD in History at

King's College London King's College London (informally King's or KCL) is a public research university located in London, England. King's was established by royal charter in 1829 under the patronage of King George IV and the Duke of Wellington. In 1836, King's ...

. She spent most of her childhood in Winnipeg, Manitoba and received her Bachelor of Arts at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota and her Master of Arts in Religion at Yale Divinity School. She completed her PhD at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

which focuses on the history of Prosperity gospel in the United States. Raised by parents who worked in academia and with a research interest in Father Christmas, her family had a strong tradition of celebrating Christmas. Her monograph published in 2020,''The Preacher’s Wife: Women and Power in American Megaministry'', was a product of the sabbatical grant for researchers from The Louisville Institute.

Personal life

Bowler married Toban Penner, her high school classmate, in 2002. Together they have a son, Zach. In 2015, she was diagnosed with

Stage IV cancer Cancer staging is the process of determining the extent to which a cancer has developed by growing and spreading. Contemporary practice is to assign a number from I to IV to a cancer, with I being an isolated cancer and IV being a cancer that ha ...

with no family history of cancer. Her memoir, ''Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I've Loved)'', was published in 2018, and the book was listed as hardcover nonfiction best seller on ''New York Times'' for 5 weeks.

Writings

*
Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel
'' New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. *
Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved.
' New York: Random House, 2018. *
The Preacher's Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities
'' Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. *
No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear)
'' Penguin, 2021.

References

External links

* 21st-century Canadian historians Canadian historians of religion Canadian women historians Duke Divinity School faculty Duke University alumni Living people Macalester College alumni Writers from Durham, North Carolina Yale Divinity School alumni Writers from Winnipeg Year of birth missing (living people) {{Canada-historian-stub