Kate Bowler faces off against cancer and bad theology

Kate Bowler’s memoir of faith in the face of a terminal cancer diagnosis has some exquisite and deeply moving prose, and she can also be funny. Though sometimes her humor is a bit too thin, a hair too forced, her laughter is more complicated than mere whistling in the dark. She knows there is bleak humor at the heart of her story.

A historian who teaches at Duke Divinity School, Bowler has focused her studies on the prosperity gospel. Her receiving a diagnosis of stage IV colon cancer at age 35 is not quite as ironic as a prosperity preacher dying young (a theological minefield of a scenario she’s encountered in her research), but it nonetheless makes for a case study far too close for comfort. She writes: “In a spiritual world in which healing is a divine right, illness is a symptom of unconfessed sin—a symptom of a lack of forgiveness, unfaithfulness, unexamined attitudes, or careless words. A suffering believer is a puzzle to be solved. What had caused this to happen?”

Bowler had been the suffering believer before, having experienced temporary disability and infertility during her doctoral work. Although she attended a prosperity gospel church primarily as a researcher, she was prayed for by the members of the community when she showed up for worship with arms too weak to hold a hymnal. Even as she tried to solve the puzzle of prosperity Chris­tianity, prosperity Chris­tians were trying to solve her. Bowler’s discovery that she is dying far more actively than the typical young mother presents a far more baffling puzzle to prosperity-minded people of faith.