Summary

Kate takes up swearing for Lent, a period when traditionally one is supposed to give up a vice. She tells people about an article she read "about how people in grief swear because they feel the English language has reached its limit in a time of inarticulate sorrow" (127). Kate remembers going to Houston a few years ago to research prosperity churches and found herself there on Good Friday. To her surprise, only one church was holding a Good Friday service and that church performs "The hap-happiest Good Friday service [she] had ever attended" (130). In short, she found that the prosperity gospel rejects or reinvents the most tragic day in the Christian calendar to suit its doctrine of positivity. Kate, in the midst of living with death, dislikes this religious erasure of the reality of death, despair, and tragedy which is supposed to occur...