When Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde led a prayer service at Washington’s National Cathedral the day after President Donald Trump was sworn into office, she did not hesitate, nor did she equivocate.

“Millions have put their trust in you,” she said to the president. “And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”

She continued:

“The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors.”

Her sermon lasted 15 minutes. She closed with this:

“I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.”

Shortly after the service, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins from Georgia posted a clip of Budde on X and wrote, “The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.” Trump called on her to apologize.

Budde undoubtedly expected the blowback. But blowback didn’t prevent her from speaking her conscience—and calling on her listeners to heed their own.

Talk about rising to the occasion.

The next four (maybe more) years will challenge each of us to tune out the white noise of rhetoric and disinformation and listen hard for our own cues to side, loudly, with humanity. I suppose a life well-lived always does that, but there’s an urgency right now that’s palpable.

It’s against this backdrop that Sunita Sah’s fantastic new book, “Defy: The Power of No In a World That Demands Yes,” arrives.

I spent a cold January evening holed up in my favorite bookstore recently, searching for a collection of Nikki Giovanni poems, specifically, and some direction, more broadly. “Defy” provides it.

It opens with this quote from novelist C.P. Snow: “When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”

Sah, a physician-turned-organizational psychologist, interrogates our tendency toward obedience, explores the various conditions that call for rebellion and teaches us to build the mental muscles that are required to defy.

“Defiance,” Sah writes, “means acting in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise.”

She writes about the two rookie police officers in Minneapolis who didn’t intervene while veteran officer Derek Chauvin held his knee on George Floyd’s neck until Floyd died. She writes about the psychological research showing how frequently humans will choose to obey authority, even when obeying authority will harm or kill someone. She writes about people who buck this convention—Rosa Parks when she refused to give up her bus seat; Jeffrey Wigand when he blew the whistle on the tobacco industry; a young Marine named Matthew who started to question, out loud, questionable orders during his deployment in Iraq. She calls them “moral mavericks.”

She writes about the unequal distribution of blowback.

“A hierarchy of defiance is conspicuous in our world,” she writes, “governed by social norms, stereotypes and societal and cultural expectations regarding acceptable behavior. This hierarchy dictates who gets to defy and who doesn’t, who has no choice but to be humble, and who is allowed to demand respect. It allows some to defy with few consequences, while saddling others with outsized and often dangerous penalties.”

She writes about watching her mother, an Indian immigrant in the United Kingdom, stand up to a group of bullies who harassed her mother regularly on her walks home from the market.

It’s a powerful book. But it’s also a beautiful book, connecting us to stories of quiet and not-so-quiet rebellion and inviting us to connect to our own capacity for it.

“The decision to defy does not make someone an invincible superhero, a breed apart from us” Sah writes. “It does not insulate them from harsh and negative consequences. That even Rosa Parks suffered, in the years after her refusal to move, only emphasizes a central fact: She was a human being, one who looked for work and had trouble with her bills and whose marriage sometimes buckled under the pressure of her newfound fame. She could not have foreseen the exact particulars of these costs, but she understood the risks and consequences of her refusal to move on the bus that day—and she did it anyway.”

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