Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

Well, we guessed wrong. The only questions were whether it would a close election or a landslide, and whether Trump would concede, and what to do with the angry people when he didn't concede, and how Clinton would start a presidency with such ill will. We didn't anticipate this. We didn't, in fact, a Trump candidacy. I feel as though the whole nation is now as blindsided as the GOP was when Trump starting picking off establishment Republicans from Jeb Bush to Ted Cruz (man, did I just write Cruz was establishment? weird...). How could we not have seen this coming? The "it" book of the political season Hillbilly Elegy is part biography, part political commentary and does a good deal to describe the hidden America of migrants from Appalachia who settled into the steel towns of Ohio and Pennsylvania, then got lost as a changing economy made it impossible to get a good-paying job without a college degree. The book is lauded from across the political spectrum as ...

The following is the talk I wrote for church last week. I stayed up until 1 am because I got so excited to write it. It's called Simple and Powerful Discipleship, but I like to call it, "You don't have to become a martyr to be a saint." I’m Mary Hedengren Perez and my husband Krystian and I moved into the ward just a couple of months ago. He spoke last month. I serve as Primary secretary and Krystian works with the Priests and Cub Scouts. We were extremely grateful to receive these callings because, due to a series of unusual circumstances, we had gone the nearly 4 months since we were married without callings in the church. This disappointed us because we were looking forward to serving in a family ward. We certainly had “real callings” in our singles ward, but we were eager to widen the range of our service. We speculated endlessly, wondering whether we would serve the youth, the children or even the babies. We spoke with friends of...

Every year, the American Library Association promotes Banned Books Week, which tricks kids into reading literature under the guise of being rebellious. I'm not saying this as a criticism. I, myself taught one of a dozen sections of Banned Books and Novel Ideas at my old university, helping students fulfill a fine arts credit and feel like a literary bad-asses. But, looking around at my colleagues' syllabi, I realized that everything has been banned and nothing was. There were books, certainly, like Harry Potter, that had been banned by some fundamental evangelical librarian in some small town in Ohio, and there had been works that have been "soft banned," like when South Carolina's House of Representatives tried to cut funding because Fun House , a graphic novel about coming of age as a young lesbian was required reading for incoming freshmen, but outright bans have been rare in this country. I ended up taking an international approach with my reading list, look...