What if you started thinking really concretely about small, hard choices? That’s exactly what palliative care physicians do every day. They help us think about what we really want—knowing that we have limited time and limited resources. You’re going to love our guest today, Dr. Kathryn Mannix, palliative care physician and cognitive behavioral therapist. She offers practical steps to help people and their loved ones make sense of what limited choices they have, navigate any pain and fear they may experience, and gives the most comforting speech on what the end of a life looks like that we’ve ever heard. (I promise this is not scary at all. It is perfect.)

In this conversation, Kate and Kathryn discuss:

• Why we want to keep a lid on the scary things of life 

• What even is palliative care

• How palliative care-type thinking can help us live better 

• What happens to hope when facing end of life

This is a masterclass in walking right up to the edge with people, in the most gentle, compassionate way. 

If you liked this episode, you’ll also love: 

• Sunita Puri on living in uncertainty

• Rev. Tom Long on the importance of the rituals for death and dying

Watch clips from this conversation, read the full transcript, and access discussion questions by clicking here or visiting katebowler.com/podcasts.

Follow Kate on Instagram, Facebook, or X (formerly known as Twitter)—@katecbowler. Links to social pages and more available at linktr.ee/katecbowler.

This episode originally aired October 2024.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Does life ever feel like an endless to-do list? Like if you could just wake up tomorrow with a little more discipline, you’d finally master your schedule, achieve balance, and feel…enough? 

On today's episode, Oliver Burkeman (bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals) and Kate unravel some of the beautiful lies we cling to about time and control, the fantasy of hyper-efficiency, and what it might look like to embrace the limits that make us who we are. 

In this conversation, Kate and Oliver discuss: 

• Some of the most common self-help myths that stand in our way

• Why the relentless pursuit of self-improvement often leaves us feeling empty, anxious, and overwhelmed. 

• How embracing our limits can lead to more contentment

This is a conversation about limits—not as something to overcome, but as a doorway to something richer, deeper, and (dare I say) more human.

If you liked this episode, you’ll also love: 

• Katie Couric on The Courage to Try (and Wisdom to Know When to Let Go)

• Susan David on Toxic Positivity

• Samantha Irby on Doing My Best (Life Now)

• Elizabeth Gilbert on Why Your Creativity Matters

Watch clips from this conversation, read the full transcript, and access discussion questions by clicking here.

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. 

This episode originally aired December 2024.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What happens when joy shows up anyway? In their third annual Happy Crappies, Kate and her dear friend Kelly Corrigan dare to name what went right in 2025 — personally, professionally, and globally — without apology or superstition. From deeply human moments that no machine could replicate, to long-overdue reckonings that reframe decades of pain, they trace the quiet ways meaning emerges when people really see one another. Along the way, they explore what joy actually is (and isn’t), why it so often arrives as a surprise, and how naming the cost of love might be one of the most hopeful acts we have.

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What happens when the things you tried to fix turn out to be forever? In their third annual Happy Crappy, Kate and her dear friend Kelly Corrigan wade into the personal, professional, and global losses of 2025. From chronic pain that refuses to budge, to families that shrink and institutions under siege, they name the hard things with tenderness, wit, and just the right amount of downer. Along the way, they ask what it means to live with limits—and whether acceptance might be its own kind of hope.

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By this point in December, love has been merchandised within an inch of its life. It jingles in ads that say if you really love someone, you should buy them a luxury car with a bow the size of a house.

But Advent tells another story. God did not arrive in a grand gesture—no skywriting, no fireworks, no leather interior with heated seats. Love slipped into a Bethlehem stable, swaddled in rags. 

This is not the love we usually want. We’d prefer it to be shiny and obvious. Instead, God gives us the kind of love that chooses vulnerability. A baby who cannot even hold up his huge noggin. A terrified teenage mom. And a dad who's trying to believe this is not all a terrible mistake.

And yet—this is the love that remakes the whole world. Not quick or efficient, but slow and human. Love that needs to be changed and snuggled. Love that grows up to sit with outcasts and weep at gravesides and promise that nothing—not even death—can separate us from God.

So here we are, a few days from Christmas, and maybe the invitation is to look for love in small ways. In a text that says, “Made it home safe.” In a neighbor shoveling your walkway. Love in the God who came close, unnoticed but never unneeded.

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!

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The TODAY Show’s Jenna Bush Hager sits down for a wide-ranging conversation with Kate Bowler. Together, they share about the importance of family and intergenerational relationships (Jenna shares such tender stories about her grandparents), how they hope to let their kids make mistakes and be met with grace, and how they both (try to) find beauty in ordinary, regular days and regular problems. 

In this conversation, Kate and Jenna discuss:

• How to model openness and empathy across difference (even when people really, really disagree)
• Why they want to raise their kids to be curious and independent
• How the love of others makes us brave—brave enough to make mistakes (and why that’s okay)

Kate visited Jenna in New York City for this conversation. And Jenna is just as lovely and generous of spirit as you’d imagine.

CW: fertility issues; Alzheimer’s 

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!

This episode originally aired September 2023.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Every grocery store speaker is now officially blasting “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” And let’s be honest: sometimes it feels like a demand. The happiest Christmas music can feel like salt in the wound when life is heavy. If this season is not “merry and bright” for you, you’re not alone.

That’s why many churches will hold “Blue Christmas” services next week. It’s an American tradition that says out loud what so many feel quietly: the holidays can hurt. These services dim the lights, play gentler music, light blue candles, and make space for grief. They remind us that the story of Christmas itself is no stranger to darkness—Jesus was born into a world of oppression and fear. Joy didn’t arrive because the world was perfect; it arrived anyway.

I thought perhaps now, only halfway through the Advent season, it might be a good time to take a peek at the customs and traditions and plans that you’ve got on the calendar and see if you need to make any room for grief. Maybe the invitation of Advent is not to blast the cheeriest carol until we believe it, but to prepare room for joy by telling the truth. By letting sorrow breathe. By choosing practices that gently turn our hearts back toward joy without pretending the sadness is gone.

What might that look like for you? A quiet walk near some city Christmas lights. A playlist that mixes Bing Crosby with a hymn that actually makes you cry. A phone call to the person who understands the empty chair at your table.

Joy doesn’t demand we silence our grief. It asks us to make just enough room for God to slip in beside it. And sometimes, that tiny crack of space is all joy needs to return.

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!

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Life is painful. Period. But are there some aspects of our faith or our posture toward the world that can change how we experience it? 

Father Richard Rohr is everyone’s favorite preacher of love. Love for each other. Love from God. 

In this conversation, Kate and Richard talk about:

• How great love and great suffering can move us into a new stage of life 
• The spirituality of subtraction
• Making room for mystery of joy and suffering
• His secret to staying present to God

Together, might we all learn when to hold on and when to let go.

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!

This episode originally aired November 2021.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’ve all seen the Christmas pageants where Mary is very sweet and demure and she is wearing a tablecloth pulled from the church dining hall. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how much impossible courage Mary had from the beginning. She finds out that she is pregnant in a completely scandalous way. But what does this divinely-prepared, teenage girl do when an angel crashes into her life with an announcement guaranteed to upend all her best plans? She sings.

But not a sweet lullaby. Mary belts out a protest song:

“He has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:52–53).

This is not the peace of spa music and chamomile tea. It’s the kind of peace that rearranges the furniture of the universe. That scatters the arrogant and topples the unjust. God’s peace doesn’t politely avoid conflict; it writes the soundtrack for a revolution.

And somehow, Mary holds all of this—terror, disruption, and hope—in her own body. She sings peace into a world that did not ask for it, but desperately needs it. And here we are, centuries later, humming along too.

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!

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The pandemic introduced many to living with uncertainty. But for some, uncertainty has always been their norm. Actress Nikki Deloach has starred in several Hallmark Christmas movies, but her life hasn’t matched the happily-ever-after plot-lines of her characters. Nikki’s dad was diagnosed with an aggressive form of dementia and her son was diagnosed with congenital heart defects in utero… all in the same week. In this conversation, Kate and Nikki discuss how to live with constant uncertainty, how to stay open to both the terror and the beauty of living close to the edge, and how to make Christmas meaningful when hope is hard to come by. 

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!

This episode originally aired December 2020. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Well, here we are. December has arrived (shudder). And with it, the great cultural sprint: decorations, office parties, and the annual anxiety dream about whether you will accidentally forget someone on your gift list (spoiler: you will). Some of you already finished your shopping over Thanksgiving and have a freezer full of perfectly labeled Christmas cookies. (Who are you?! Come to my house and fix my life!) The rest of us are still trying to remember where we put last year’s wrapping paper.

It’s easy, this time of year, to let December carry us away. The shopping carts, the streaming playlists, the endless events. Advent, though, asks us to live by a different rhythm. The early church saw this season as one of watching and waiting—not just for Christmas morning, but for the whole story of God’s redemption. They began the year not by rushing, but by slowing down.

The prophet Isaiah describes this posture well: “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15). The church fathers loved this verse because it sounded like Advent: strength found not in frantic activity, but in patient trust.

So maybe the invitation this December is not to do more, but to intend more. To decide, amid the cookie dough and to-do lists, that this month won’t only be measured in packages mailed or tables set, but in moments of return. Little pauses of prayer. A fat candle lit on the dining room table that makes you take a breath. A quiet reminder that God is coming, and we don’t have to hold the season—or our lives—together by ourselves.

So welcome to December, friends. Whether you’re ahead of the game or already behind, you are exactly where you need to be: at the beginning.

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful. Join us for Advent over there, too!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.