Rev. Mariann Budde, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, made headlines last year for her sermon cautioning a newly inaugurated President Donald Trump to impart mercy on queer people and immigrants in the US. In the days following, the president demanded an apology, while online commenters praised Budde for her bravery.
Today, Budde published a new children’s picture book, I Can Learn to Be Brave, which adapts her 2023 adult book, How We Learn to Be Brave. The new title is her second adaptation, having published a young-adult version in 2025.
The picture book, illustrated by Holly Hatam, follows a young girl who has known all her life that she is not brave. She did not play in the rain, raise her hand in class, or jump fences like the other kids—until a friend showed her how. The message is simple: We can all learn to overcome our fears, and it’s often friends who teach us.
People learn about courage in childhood, Budde says, when everything is new—which is why she was excited to adapt her work into a children’s book.
“So many of the most brave things we do aren’t like big, flashy things,” Budde says. ”They’re often private, but they’re no less consequential and no less frightening at the threshold.”
Budde says it was important to her that the main character be a girl. Partly, she says, because she wanted to write from her own experience. Budde is the first female bishop of her church, and learned her pluck in girlhood.
Besides, Budde says: “As my son pointed out to me, there aren’t that many stories about girls. There are lots of stories about boys.”
Just writing a book was a courageous act for Budde. As a child, she says she was convinced that she would never learn to read—she found it stubbornly difficult. Though she’d grown comfortable writing sermons, writing remained a point of insecurity for her through adulthood.
“When I got the contract for the first book, I was really scared that I wouldn’t be able to finish it,” Budde says. “So when I completed it, I was so grateful and I had a lot of help.”
Similar to her heroine, Budde says her bravery is made possible by her support system—formed by her faith and family. And while Budde has faced and overcome numerous challenges in life, the most famous challenge was the one presented to her the day after Trump’s second inauguration.
As she prepared to give her sermon, with the presidential family in attendance, Budde says she was spurred on by her sense of duty—she had a job to do. Still, addressing the leader of the free world does not come without nerves.
“When I decided to be really specific with President Trump at the end, those were gulp moments,” she says. “I didn’t have a lot of thought about what would happen afterwards.”
In the aftermath, Budde says she was unsurprised at the president’s response, but completely taken aback by the outpouring of gratitude she received.
“People need to be reminded of things that they believe and know to be true,” she says. “People need to be seen and know that they are seen.”
Budde got the impression that she gave voice to some Americans’ anxieties after the 2024 election, but she never intended to create an uproar. Even today, she says the country is confronting the problem of how to protect what matters without further sowing seeds of division.
“How do we stand for what we know to be true, and what we believe in, without mirroring the contempt that is all around us?” Budde says. “That’s the moral challenge of this time.”
