EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON: AND OTHER LIES I'VE LOVED, by Kate Bowler

I asked Google to find the cover of the book I'm about to praise. "Everything happens for a reason," I typed, and clicked "images." Instead of the cover, I got a pageful of annoyingly pious memes and posters--and this perfectly wonderful empathy card,

which you can order here.

I've never met Kate Bowler, but I heard Terry Gross interview her on "Fresh Air" (which is why I read her book), and I'm pretty sure she would love the card. 

Bowler, who teaches at Duke Divinity School, is the author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford, 2013). The prosperity gospel is attractive: God wants you to be healthy and wealthy! And so if you trust God enough, and get rid of the sins that hold you back, and think positively, and (often) donate money to some ministry, God will make you prosper!

Except when he doesn't. Suppose, for example, that, like Bowler, you contract a mysterious neurological impairment that baffles doctors and keeps you from using your hands. Suppose you lose a much-wanted child to miscarriage. Suppose you discover at age 35 that you have stage 4 colon cancer.

Is your suffering your fault? Did you not trust enough, give enough, repent enough? Is God trying to teach you something? Is he using you to teach someone else?

No, says Bowler. These things happen because we're human.

Read this book if you've ever wondered why people suffer--or if you think you already know the reason.

Read it if you've ever wondered what to say to somebody whose has had a sobering diagnosis, or who has lost a loved one, or who is going through some other painful crisis. 

Read it, too, if you've ever wondered what not to say. The two Appendixes alone are worth the price of the book: "Absolutely never say this to people experiencing terrible times: a short list" and "Give this a go, see how it works: a short list."

Read it if you appreciate memoirs that are introspective but not self-absorbed, wise but not preachy, ironic but not unkind, often hilarious but never, ever chirpy.

And read it if you like good writing about what it means to be human that will make you laugh as well as cry.

I went back to Google and asked for "Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason." Here's what the cover looks like. I hope you read the book.

THE BRIGHT HOUR by Nina Riggs

Ancient Egyptians brought skeletons to their feasts, exhorting guests to drink and make merry while they still could. American Puritans in the 17th century kept skulls as warnings to sober up and focus on the afterlife. Memento mori, the gruesome reminders were called: remember that you must die. People died suddenly, and young. They wanted to be prepared. 

Nina Riggs did not feel prepared when she learned that a small spot in her breast was malignant. Cancer ran in her family: it had taken three grandparents and several aunts, and her mother was in treatment for multiple myeloma. But Riggs was only 37. Her sons, Freddy and Benny, were eight and five; she was not ready to leave them. Merrymaking had its place, but it didn’t address her concerns. And the afterlife, if it existed, was unknowable.

That's how my review of Riggs's The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying begins. It's in the Fall Books issue of The Christian Century, and you can read the rest here for a few more days. After that, the magazine will likely put the review behind a firewall that can be breached only by paid subscribers.

It's a short review; you have time to click and read. Seize the day. Enjoy the now. That's what Riggs advises. In the words of her great-great-great-grandfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, she wanted to be "cheered with the moist, warm glittering, budding and melodious hour that takes down the narrow walls of my soul and extends its pulsation and life to the very horizon. That is morning; to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body and to become as large as the World."

Reviewers don't always like the books they describe, but I loved this one.

MORTALITY by Christopher Hitchens

Before yesterday, I had read no books by Christopher Hitchens. I had read about him, to be sure. His name kept popping up everywhere.

 "I wouldn't walk around the block to hear Christopher Hitchens take cheap shots at Christians," writes Stephen Prothero in God Is Not One. Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, calls Hitchens one of the "'Four Horsemen' of the angry atheist apocalypse" (along with Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett)--fundamentalists all, but by another name.

And yet Hitchens's books are extremely popular, as are books by the other Horsemen. "If you want to know why the 'new atheists' ... sell so many books," says theologian and former bishop N.T. Wright in Simply Jesus, "the answer is that they're offering the modernist version of the good old-fashioned theological term 'assurance.' They are assuring anxious ex-believers that the nightmare of small-minded and stultifying 'religion' is gone forever." In other words, they offer to save us from fundamentalism.

Writing Hitchens's obituary in Christianity Today, an evangelical (though not fundamentalist) magazine, Douglas Wilson takes no offense:

This [propensity to attack sacred cows] was all part of Christopher's very public rhetorical strategy, not a function of an inability to domesticate a surly temperament. He was actually an affable and pleasant dinner companion, and fully capable of being the perfect gentleman.

Angry fundamentalist, savior from fundamentalism, nice guy... who was Christopher Hitchens really? In a New York Times review of Mortality, Hitchens's just-published posthumous book about his slow death from cancer, Christopher Buckley muses: "What discrepant parts were in him: the fierce tongue, the tender heart."

It was Buckley's review that prompted me to put Mortality on hold (now there's a great idea...). I won't sum up the book here; you'll do better to click this link and read Buckley's heartfelt appreciation. I'll just say that Mortality, like life, is short. It consists of a Foreword by Graydon Carter,who worked with Hitchens at Vanity Fair; seven essays that Hitchens wrote for that magazine; an eighth chapter of "fragmentary jottings" in the manner of Pascal's Pensées; and an Afterword by Hitchens's wife, Carol Blue. You can read the whole thing in an evening; if you're a fast reader, you can read it twice.

But why read a book about dying at all? Maybe because you're a Hitchens fan (I'm not), or because you love the way he writes (I do), or because you hope to gain wisdom (you may).  I guess I read it because mortality has been much on my mind of late. Stage four cancers, fatal strokes, hospital infections, dementia have attacked family members and friends, some in their 90s, some--like Hitchens, like me--in their 60s. I looked at mortality myself last year (and blogged about it here). I wanted to hear what Hitchens, the gentlemanly curmudgeon, had to say. I wanted to know how he felt, knowing his time was nearly up.

In chapter one, Hitchens reacts to learning he has stage four cancer (as he later notes, "the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five"):

I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

Hitchens never allows his dying, however predictable and banal, to bore his readers.