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09/28/2021 - 8:00pm to 9:00pm
Description:

Join Kate Bowler as she shares her story—and her path forward—with her trademark dry wit and unflinching honesty.

Click here for tickets.

About this event

**This is a virtual event that will be hosted on Zoom - you will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing and sufficient Internet access. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.**

It’s hard to give up on the feeling that the life you really want is just out of reach. A beach body by summer. A promotion on the horizon. Everyone wants to believe that they are headed toward good, better, best.

But what happens when the life you hoped for is put on hold indefinitely?

Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices, until she discovered, at age 35, that her body was wracked with cancer. In her new memoir No Cure for Being Human, she searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of today’s “best life now” advice industry, which insists on exhausting positivity and on trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn, and out-perform our humanness. We are, she finds, as fragile as the day we were born—and there’s no cure for being human.

Join Kate Bowler for a special Spiritual Thought virtual event on Tuesday, September 28 at 8:00 PM ET on Zoom, as Bowler shares her story—and her path forward—with her trademark dry wit and unflinching honesty. She will explain how she grappled with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tried to come to terms with her limitations in a culture that says anything is possible.

With your $35.53 ticket, you’ll receive a hardcover copy of No Cure for Being Human, plus access to this moving, honest, and uplifting Zoom conversation.

Books will be shipped by our indie bookstore partner, The Regulator Bookshop. Shipment dates will depend on when you bought your ticket. Please be sensitive to the workload of our independent bookstore partner: It may take a couple weeks to receive your book, but your support of The Regulator Bookshop is so important and will not go unnoticed. The pandemic has not been kind to small and local businesses. Every book purchase helps.

Sign up at Eventbrite to save your spot today!

Kate Bowler is an associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School. She completed her undergraduate degree at Macalester College, received a master’s of religion from Yale Divinity School, and a PhD at Duke University. She is the author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, the New York Times bestselling memoir Everything Happens for a Reason (and other lies I've loved), and The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities. She has appeared on NPR, Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, Toban, and son, Zach.

Spiritual Thought is Random House’s community of spiritual seekers, curious minds, and engaged readers.

Please note we are only able to ship to U.S. addresses.

By registering for the event you agree to be automatically signed up for the Well Enough and Random House Events newsletters and partners associated with the event. (Privacy Policy) and Terms of Use

 
 
09/30/2021 - 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Description:

Join us in a Zoom conversation between Monica Byrne and Steve Prothero. Byrne's novel, The Actual Star was just released on Sept. 14th. They will be discussing the novel, writing, and anything else that comes up!

Register here!

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas meets Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, as acclaimed author Monica Byrne (The Girl in the Road) spins a brilliant multigenerational saga spanning two thousand years, from the collapse of the ancient Maya to a far-future utopia on the brink of civil war.

The Actual Star takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents —telling three powerful tales a thousand years apart, all of them converging in the same cave in the Belizean jungle.

Braided together are the stories of a pair of teenage twins who ascend the throne of a Maya kingdom; a young American woman on a trip of self-discovery in Belize; and two dangerous charismatics vying for the leadership of a new religion and racing toward a confrontation that will determine the fate of the few humans left on Earth after massive climate change.

In each era, a reincarnated trinity of souls navigates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, and love and hate—until all of their age-old questions about the nature of existence converge deep underground, where only in complete darkness can they truly see.

The Actual Star is a feast of ideas about where humanity came from, where we are now, and where we’re going—and how, in every age, the same forces that drive us apart also bind us together.

 

Monica Byrne grew up in Annville, Pennsylvania, as the youngest child of two theologians. She studied biochemistry at Wellesley, NASA, and MIT before pivoting to fiction and theatre. She is the author of the novel The Girl in the Road, winner of the 2015 Otherwise Award; as well as the plays Nightwork, What Every Girl Should Know, Tarantino’s Yellow Speedo, and Ohio!, which have been performed around the world. She also performed the first science-fictional TED talk in Vancouver. You can visit her online at monicabyrne.org and support her work at patreon.com/monicabyrne. She is based in Durham, North Carolina, and loves a good thunderstorm.

Stephen Prothero is the C. Allyn and Elizabeth V. Russell Professor of Religion in America in the Department of Religion at Boston University. He is the author of numerous books including Religion Matters: An Introduction to the World’s Religions (W.W. Norton 2020), Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (HarperOne, 2016), God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter (HarperOne, 2010), and the New York Times bestseller Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (HarperOne, 2007). His books have been published on five continents and translated into eight languages. He lives on Cape Cod, and he tweets @sprothero.