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Book Summary and Reviews of Good Enough by Kate Bowler

Good Enough by Kate Bowler

Good Enough

40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection

by Kate Bowler

  • Published:
  • Feb 2022, 272 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A compassionate, intelligent, and wry series of Christian daily reflections on learning to live with imperfection in a culture of self-help that promotes endless progress, from the author of Everything Happens for a Reason and the executive producer of the Everything Happens podcast.

In Kate Bowler's bestselling memoir Everything Happens for a Reason, readers witnessed the ways she, as a divinity-school professor and young mother, reckoned with a Stage IV cancer diagnosis; in her follow-up memoir, No Cure for Being Human, she unflinchingly and winsomely unpacked the ways that life becomes both hard and beautiful when we abandon certainty and the illusion of control in our lives. Now, in their first-ever devotional book, Kate Bowler and co-author Jessica Richie offer 40ish short spiritual reflections on how we can make sense of life not as a pursuit of endless progress but as a chronic condition. This book is a companion for when you want to stop feeling guilty that you're not living your best life now.

Written gently and with humor, Good Enough is permission for all those who need to hear that there are some things you can fix—and some things you can't. And it's okay that life isn't always better. In these gorgeously written reflections, Bowler and Richie offer fresh imagination for how truth, beauty, and meaning can be discovered amid 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 recognizing that though we are finite, the life in front of us can be beautiful.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"With humor and wit, Good Enough guides us into a spirituality that is at once rich and humble, challenging us to search for beauty and meaning in deep waters, yet never asking more of us than a tender and compassionate God would. This devotional is medicine for all those thirsting for mercy in the mundane." —Cole Arthur Riley, author of This Here Flesh and creator of Black Liturgies

"This book understands me, especially the parts I keep hidden for fear people will think less of me if they know how sad I can get. Kate and Jessica bless those who mourn. They also connect the dots between feelings and actions, giving readers concrete things to do that lead to small springs of healing bubbling up all over the place." —Barbara Brown Taylor, author of An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark

This information about Good Enough was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Kate Bowler

Kate Bowler is the author of the New York Times bestseller Everything Happens for a Reason, as well as No Cure for Being Human, Blessed, and The Preacher's Wife. An associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School, Bowler earned an undergraduate degree at Macalester College, a master's degree in religion from Yale Divinity School, and a Ph.D. from Duke University.

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