How long does it take to read Everything Happens for a Reason?
Kate Bowler
Everything Happens for a Reason by Kate Bowler takes about 3 hours 49 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 49 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2018. 208 pages, about 57,200 words.
8 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 6 hours 21 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 49 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 23 minutes |
The page count is the median across 2 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God's disapproval. At thirty-five, everything in her life seems to point toward "blessing." She is thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loves life with her newborn son. Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. The prospect of her own mortality forces Kate to realize that she has been tacitly subscribing to the prosperity gospel, living with the conviction that she can control the shape of her life with "a surge of determination." Even as this type of Christianity celebrates the American can-do spirit, it implies that if you "can't do" and succumb to illness or misfortune, you are a failure. Kate is very sick, and no amount of positive thinking will shrink her tumors. What does it mean to die, she wonders, in a society that insists everything happens for a reason? Kate is stripped of this certainty only to discover that without it, life is hard but beautiful in a way it never has been before. Frank and funny, dark and wise, Kate Bowler pulls the reader deeply into her life in an account she populates affectionately with a colorful, often hilarious retinue of friends, mega-church preachers, relatives, and doctors. Everything Happens for a Reason tells her story, offering up her irreverent, hard-won observations on dying and the ways it has taught her to live. - Publisher.
Subjects: Catastrophic illness, Life change events, Cancer, Christian life, Colon (Anatomy), Patients
