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Author's New York Times essay, 'Death, the Prosperity Gospel and
Me' (http://nyti.ms/2k87bUM) was chosen by the newspaper as one of
their top 20 articles of 2016, and was read by millions
From the New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens
for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved, a fascinating look at the
world of Christian women celebrities Since the 1970s, an important
new figure has appeared on the center stage of American
evangelicalism-the celebrity preacher's wife. Although most
evangelical traditions bar women from ordained ministry, many women
have carved out unofficial positions of power in their husbands'
spiritual empires or their own ministries. The biggest stars-such
as Beth Moore, Joyce Meyer, and Victoria Osteen-write bestselling
books, grab high ratings on Christian television, and even preach.
In this engaging book, Kate Bowler offers a sympathetic and
revealing portrait of megachurch women celebrities, showing how
they must balance the demands of celebrity culture and
conservative, male-dominated faiths.
Millions of Americans have fallen in love with the prosperity
gospel and its new kind of preachers, who originally cultivated
their fame with personal appearances in sold-out arenas. Now
podcasts, Internet streaming, and daily television programming
carry their sermons to millions. At almost any moment, day or
night, the American public can tune in to see these familiar faces
and a consistent message: God desires to bless you. Catherine
Bowler's Blessed represents the first attempt to examine the
twentieth-century American prosperity gospel movement as a whole,
seeking to introduce readers to its major figures and features.
Bowler offers an interpretive framework for scholars and
non-specialists alike to understand these diverse expressions of
Christian abundance as a cohesive movement bound by shared
understandings. She first traces the movement's burgeoning theology
of faith from the postwar revivals to its maturity in the late
1980s, and then focuses on its continuing pursuit of divine wealth,
as believers look to their bank accounts for proof of their
spiritual progress. Bowler examines divine health through the same
lens, as believers use their bodies as barometers of faith. The
book concludes with an exploration of the contemporary movement's
expectation of victory, as participants orient their lives toward
unimpeded progress. Inspired, they count themselves blessed.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens
for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved, a fascinating look at the
world of Christian women celebrities Since the 1970s, an important
new figure has appeared on the center stage of American
evangelicalism-the celebrity preacher's wife. Although most
evangelical traditions bar women from ordained ministry, many women
have carved out unofficial positions of power in their husbands'
spiritual empires or their own ministries. The biggest stars-such
as Beth Moore, Joyce Meyer, and Victoria Osteen-write bestselling
books, grab high ratings on Christian television, and even preach.
In this engaging book, Kate Bowler, an acclaimed historian of
religion and the author of the bestselling memoir Everything
Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved, offers a
sympathetic and revealing portrait of megachurch women celebrities,
showing how they must balance the demands of celebrity culture and
conservative, male-dominated faiths. Whether standing alone or next
to their husbands, the leading women of megaministry play many
parts: the preacher, the homemaker, the talent, the counselor, and
the beauty. Boxed in by the high expectations of modern Christian
womanhood, they follow and occasionally subvert the visible and
invisible rules that govern the lives of evangelical women, earning
handsome rewards or incurring harsh penalties. They must be pretty,
but not immodest; exemplary, but not fake; vulnerable to sin, but
not deviant. And black celebrity preachers' wives carry a special
burden of respectability. But despite their influence and wealth,
these women are denied the most important symbol of spiritual
power-the pulpit. The story of women who most often started off as
somebody's wife and ended up as everyone's almost-pastor, The
Preacher's Wife is a compelling account of women's search for
spiritual authority in the age of celebrity.
How have millions of American Christians come to measure spiritual
progress in terms of their financial status and physical
well-being? How has the movement variously called Word of Faith,
Health and Wealth, Name It and Claim It, or simply prosperity
gospel come to dominate much of our contemporary religious
landscape? Kate Bowler's Blessed is the first book to fully explore
the origins, unifying themes, and major figures of a burgeoning
movement that now claims millions of followers in America. Bowler
traces the roots of the prosperity gospel: from the touring
mesmerists, metaphysical sages, pentecostal healers, business
oracles, and princely prophets of the early 20th century; through
mid-century positive thinkers like Norman Vincent Peale and
revivalists like Oral Roberts and Kenneth Hagin; to today's hugely
successful prosperity preachers. Bowler focuses on such
contemporary figures as Creflo Dollar, pastor of Atlanta's
30,000-member World Changers Church International; Joel Osteen,
known as "the smiling preacher," with a weekly audience of seven
million; T. D. Jakes, named by Time magazine one of America's most
influential new religious leaders; Joyce Meyer, evangelist and
women's empowerment guru; and many others. At almost any moment,
day or night, the American public can tune in to these preachers-on
TV, radio, podcasts, and in their megachurches-to hear the message
that God desires to bless them with wealth and health. Bowler
offers an interpretive framework for scholars and general readers
alike to understand the diverse expressions of Christian abundance
as a cohesive movement bound by shared understandings and common
goals.
***A SUNDAY TIMES AND INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR AND INSTANT NEW
YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*** The bestselling author of Everything
Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I've Loved) asks, how do you
move forward with a life you didn't choose? Hailed by Glennon Doyle
as 'the Christian Joan Didion', Kate Bowler used to accept the
modern idea that life is an endless horizon of possibilities, a
series of choices which if made correctly, would lead us to a place
just out of our reach. A beach body by summer. A trip to Disneyland
around the corner. A promotion on the horizon. But then at
thirty-five she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, and now
she has to ask one of the most fundamental questions of all: How do
we create meaning in our lives when the life we hoped for is put on
hold indefinitely? In No Cure for Being Human, Kate searches for a
way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of our modern
'best life now' advice industry, which offers us exhausting
positivity, trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn
and out-perform our humanness. With dry wit and unflinching honesty
she grapples with her cancer diagnosis, her ambition and her faith
and searches for some kind of peace with her limitations in a
culture that says that anything is possible. Frank and funny, dark
and wise, Kate's irreverent, hard-won observations in No Cure For
Being Human chart a bold path towards learning new ways to live.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "A meditation on sense-making when there's no sense to be made, on letting go when we can't hold on, and on being unafraid even when we're terrified."--Lucy Kalanithi
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.
The bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I've Loved) asks, how do you move forward with a life you didn't choose?
Hailed by Glennon Doyle as 'the Christian Joan Didion', Kate Bowler used to accept the modern idea that life is an endless horizon of possibilities, a series of choices which if made correctly, would bring us to a place just out of reach. A beach body by summer. A trip to Disneyland around the corner. A promotion on the horizon. But then at thirty-five she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, and now she has to ask one of the most fundamental questions of all: How do we create meaning in our lives when the life we hoped for is put on hold indefinitely?
In No Cure for Being Human, Kate searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of our modern 'best life now' advice industry, which offers us exhausting positivity, trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn and out-perform our humanness. With dry wit and unflinching honesty she grapples with her cancer diagnosis, her ambition and her faith and searches for some kind of
peace with her limitations in a culture that says that anything is possible.
Frank and funny, dark and wise, Kate's irreverent, hard-won observations in No Cure For Being Human chart a bold path toward learning new ways to live.
***THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*** We begin to feel less
alone, more loved and less judged when good is . . . enough. In
this collection of 40ish short spiritual devotionals, Good Enough
reveals the small things we can do to inch toward a deeper, richer,
truer kind of faith. Through blessings, prayers and human truths,
learn to live with imperfection in a culture of self-help that
promotes endless progress, and discover a companion for when you
want to stop feeling guilty that you're not living your best life
now. Hailed by Glennon Doyle as 'the Christian Joan Didion', in
these gorgeously written reflections Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie
proffer fresh imagination for how truth, beauty, and meaning can be
discovered amidst the chaos of life. Their words celebrate
kindness, honesty and interdependence in a culture that rewards
ruthless individualism and blind optimism. Ultimately, in these
pages we can rest in the encouragement to strive for what is
possible today - while recognising that though we are finite, the
life in front of us can still be beautiful.
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