 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book under 250 pages.
How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith, by Mariann Edgar Budde. This book caught my attention after the author, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, became a target for Trump's wrath for admonishing him about compassion, including toward immigrants and refugees. She previously rebuked him for using her church as a prop so he could hold a bible upside down while tear-gassing protesters. The book is written from a progressive Christian point of view, and quotes the bible liberally, but is clearly meant to be inclusive. For instance, she quotes Ta-nehisi Coates on how his atheism informs his activism. For Coates, resistance to injustice has to be its own reward, because resistance is rarely successful in one person's lifetime. The lessons are unsurprising: take risks, own your mistakes, be persistent. But the examples are well-chosen, whether from famous activists, people in her own life, or her own experiences such as dealing with chronic pain. Even when discussing an obvious choice like Martin Luther King Jr., she chooses an unexpected example - how even his own colleagues disagreed with him about the Poor People's Campaign, but he did the courageous thing anyway.
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