Joyful, Anyway

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 l