*OFFSITE* Kate Bowler, "Joyful Anyway" w/ Shelby Van Pelt

About the Book: We are overwhelmed. Frightening headlines, illness, uncertainty, grief, and email. We are left wondering why, if we’re doing everything right, life still feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole. Joyful, Anway is bestselling author Kate Bowler’s bracingly honest exploration of this dilemma. By sharing her personal experience and stories from some of our culture’s preeminent historians, philosophers, and religious scholars, Bowler presents an original and inspiring understanding of joy. This is a type of joy that is different from happiness, and it does not depend on resolving the things that make life difficult. Drawing on a decade of living with serious illness and a lifetime, as a divinity professor, studying America’s obsession with progress, she shows why the relentless pursuit of happiness may, in fact, keep us from experiencing true joy. Joy isn’t something you can optimize or manufacture. It subverts our expectations, finding us when life rewrites our scripts. Joyful, Anyway offers language for the ache we all carry and practices—loosening control, introducing novelty, choosing charity—that will open us up to the surprising, technicolor moments that pull us back into life. Inspiring, funny, and soulful, Joyful, Anyway is a book you will turn to again and again. Joy reminds us that no matter what, life is still worth loving. For every time we ask is this it?, joy will answer: There is more. About the Author: Kate Bowler is the four-time New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, No Cure for Being Human, Good Enough, The Lives We Actually Have, Blessed and The Preacher’s Wife, and hosts the popular podcast Everything Happens. She is a professor of history at Duke University and shuttles home to Winnipeg for the summer with her husband and son. About the Conversation Partner: When Shelby Van Pelt isn’t writing, she’s herding cats and wrangling children. Her debut novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures (Ecco, 2022) was an instant New York Times Bestseller and a Read With Jenna Today Show book club pick. In 2023, she was awarded the Heartland Prize for Fiction and the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns First Novel Prize from The Writer’s Center. Remarkably Bright Creatures has sold over two million copies. It has spent, in aggregate, over a year on the NYT Hardcover Bestseller list. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she’s now missing the mountains in the Chicago area with her family.