Leah Libresco's Blog, page 10
March 12, 2020
Children Are a Rebuke to Our Schedules
After our baby, Beatrice, was born, I wrote a piece for the Institute for Family Studies on children as natural born interruptors, including of some of our culture’s mistaken expectations about time.
We can deceive ourselves (at least for a little while) about our limits and our control—by staying up too late to finish something for work, by cancelling on a friend we know will understand, by carving out more time, whatever the cost, to stay on schedule. But a child, starting in pregnancy, cannot be negotiated with in the same way.
That’s why children and pregnancy are the canary in the coal mine of our control-obsessed culture.
January 8, 2020
Books I Plan to Read in 2020
Technically, I did pretty well on my 2019 reading list, finishing nine of the eleven books on my list. It’s just that it sounds a lot better if you didn’t see the grocery bag of books I schlepped over Christmas break when I finished three of the books on my list during the Octave.
Beyond the list, my 2019 was made up of 172 books (55k pages). I had (to the best of my recollection, three long-haul bookclubs (The Brothers Karamazov, Can You Forgive Her?, and St. John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain: Story of a Convert). And I’m trying to make it to the end of a short-haul bookclub for Jean Danielou’s Prayer as a Political Problem.
But, very happily, a lot of my 2020 reading will be The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Goodnight Moon, I Want My Hat Back, and so on, as we prepare to welcome Beatrice Immaculata in the next few weeks. So I’ve tried to cut back (as best I can) for my proposed 2020 reading list.
Let’s see how it goes…
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America (Chris Arnade) On Wealth and Poverty (St. John Chrysostom) Placemaking and the Arts: Cultivating the Christian Life (Jennifer Allen Craft) John Henry Newman (Eamon Duffy) The Weil Conjectures (Karen Olsson) The Day is Now Far Spent (Robert Cardinal Sarah) Mercy on Trial (Austin Sarat) The Devil in a Forest (Gene Wolfe)
So, now to finish the Danielou* and keep going from there!
*book club scheduled to finish a wee bit after Beatrice’s due date
December 6, 2019
Debating Illiberalism in DC
As one of my last trips before hitting the don’t-travel-while-pregnant cutoff, I went to Washington D.C. As part of the Georgetown Initiative on Catholic Thought and Social Life, I was part of a panel with Ross Douthat, Matthew Sitman, and Austen Ivereigh. We were asked to tackle “Nationalism, Post-liberalism, and Pope Francis.”
It got a bit more heated than I’d like, but the contribution I made that I’m proudest of is at 27:30 in the video below. I lay out my definition of illiberalism, and (since, being pregnant, I’m two women on the panel), I talk a little about why liberalism’s ideal of the autonomous individual will always exclude women.
And near the end (at 1h27:30) I talk about how hard it is to talk about the magnitude of sin and of mercy at the same time.
May 19, 2019
Your Roots Shall Make Ye Free
I reviewed Michael Brennan Dougherty’s epistolary memoir, My Father Left Me Ireland, for The American Interest.
Dougherty’s rage is directed at the eunuchizing modern mindset that sees us as most free when we can be stripped of all the ties we have to others. A father can leave his children, provided the financial pain is assuaged by child support or governmental subsidy. A citizen cannot have too great a love for their own nation, lest they imply any other is lesser. A believer cannot bring their beliefs to bear in the public square, where all visions of the good need to have free access to the marketplace of ideas, provided they are not normative visions of a common good.
May 8, 2019
Fear and the Benedict Option
Any sort of retreat will also attract people who are tempted to hate the part of the world they are withdrawing from. Any group gathering in a BenOp spirit should expect to attract people at varying levels of weariness, anger, fear, and despair. Even a legitimate righteous anger can curdle into contempt or despair. To truly mend nets requires us to be aware of these temptations in ourselves and in our friends, and to seek to sin no more.
Feeling excluded or alone can lead Christians to adopt as fellow travelers provocateurs who may scandalize the secular world, but not because they preach the faith that is “foolishness to the gentiles.” Such grifting agitators are not seeking space to speak the truth, but to revel in division. They may lead people moved by real political concerns to view their opponents as permanent enemies, not our divided brothers whom we are called to pray for and convert into allies. They may lead people who already feel isolated to seek consolation by grounding their identity in race, not Christ. Conveniently, they forget that the most vicious and violent suppression of Christians falls on non-white Christians in China, Southeast Asia, and outside the West. A Benedict Option strengthening persecuted Christians shouldn’t be primarily white or Western.
May 7, 2019
Hope of Heaven in Hadestown
I reviewed Hadestown, the 2019 Best Musical, for The American Interest.
Hermes, the messenger-god who serves as narrator, warns us that “When the gods are having a fight, everybody else better hold on tight.” The world that Orpheus and Eurydice inhabit is wounded and weakened by the faltering love between Hades and Persephone. (This production does not frame Hades’s initial courtship as an abduction or rape, as many versions of the myth do.) The further away from each other they draw, the more the seasons are disordered: summers hot and scorching, winters freezing and famished. Like Oberon and Titania, Hades and Persephone can say, “This same progeny of evils comes from our debate, from our dissension. We are their parents and original.”
The gods themselves are distorted by their division. Hades is the obvious villain—the antagonist to Orpheus, the instigator of Eurydice’s death—but Amber Gray is galvanizing as an embittered Persephone. She has a furious energy to her dancing that convincingly conveys the power of a Greek god—attracting their attention, even favorably, is perilous. While her sepulchral husband turns to cold machinery and automation, she is riotous growth gone to rot, the stickiness of over-ripened grapes.
April 25, 2019
Pro-Life Outreach to Pro-Choice Workers
I travelled to Texas to interview Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood Clinic director who founded And Then There Were None, a ministry to help abortion workers leave their jobs.
“Unplanned,” the recently released film adapted from Abby Johnson’s memoir of leaving Planned Parenthood and becoming a pro-life activist, is really just a prequel.
When Johnson quit her job in 2009, she could have lived off the notoriety of being a clinic manager who changed sides, telling her conversion story to pro-life audiences. Instead, she founded And Then There Were None (ATTWN) in 2011, a nonprofit that helps other abortion workers leave their jobs.
Johnson originally joined Planned Parenthood to help care for women and knows that clinics are full of workers just like her. At the time, she saved up stories of the unambiguous good she was doing (detecting uterine cancer, aiding women with postpartum depression), to defend her job to her pro-life family and husband.
Her view of abortion changed in the fall of 2009, when she was asked to assist in an ultrasound-guided abortion just on the cusp of the second trimester. When the doctor positioned the thin tube called a cannula and turned on the vacuum, she saw the baby’s spine twist and crumple as it was sucked into the tube and out of sight.
Seeing the baby clearly as a baby made Johnson decide she had to leave her job. Remembering how she saw her co-workers made her pick her new one.
March 28, 2019
Reaching Out to Atheists with Bishop Barron
I joined Bishop Robert Barron in Santa Barbara to talk about strategies for having productive disagreements about hard topics. (My part of the video below starts at 15:30).
After my talk, I joined Bishop Barron for a discussion that was taped for Word on Fire Institute members.
January 3, 2019
Books I Plan to Read in 2019
Last year was not a very good year for my “Books to Read in 2018” list, with five of my fifteen books unread. On the other hand, I got to read Middlemarch (for the first time) and Kristin Lavransdatter (second time) with online book groups. And those big, shared books made it hard to find the right time to pick up something like Grant.
In other reading news, I read 190 books total (just over 57k pages) over 2018, and, much to my amusement, the book I read that Goodreads told me was read by the most other Goodreads users was Middlemarch! The book with the earliest publication date was The Cloud of Unknowing.
I’m still interested in the books I didn’t get to, but I think I’ll not transfer them over to this year’s list. The way I think about this list is that it helps me give myself permission to make time for these books, when they’re competing with work, hobbies, or my ever growing stack of library holds. The list is my reminder that these books can take priority.
So, without further ado, the books I’d like to read in 2019:
The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Clarissa W. Atkinson)
The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin)
Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (Hasok Chang)
Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (James Chappel)
When the Well Runs Dry: Prayer Beyond the Beginnings (Thomas Green, S.J.)
Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries (edited by Jeffrey Hamburger and Susan Marti)
Shakespeare’s Binding Language (John Kerrigan)
Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (Alexander Langlands)
The Death of Christian Culture (John Senior)
The Life of Christian Culture (John Senior)
The Child in the City (Colin Ward)
I’d definitely like to include one more old-enough-to-be-public-domain doorstopper, but I have the feeling my Middlemarch-Kristin group will settle on another book to share and fill that gap for me.
Update, we’re reading (or, in my case, rereading) The Brothers Karamazov.
October 4, 2018
Kristin Lavransdatter, Motorcycles, and Docility to Reality
I’ve been reading Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter in concert with a group of folks who have all committed to “Kristin by Christmas!” One passage I particularly loved comes when Kristin goes to stay and be schooled at a convent. Abbess Groa welcomes Kristin with these words:
I have heard good things of you, and you seem to be clever and well brought up, so I do not think you will give us any reason for displeasure. I have heard that you are promised to that noble and good man, Simon Andressøn, whom I see before me. We think it wise of your father and your betrothed to send you here to the Virgin Mary’s house for a time, so you can learn to obey and serve before you are charged with giving orders and commands. I want to impress on you now that you should learn to find joy in prayer and the divine services, so that in all your actions you will be in the habit of remembering your Creator, the Lord’s gentle Mother, and all the saints who have given us the best examples of strength, rectitude, fidelity, and all the virtues that you ought to demonstrate if you are to manage property and servants and raise children.
I love the connection Abbess Groa makes that those who are entrusted with command must be able to learn to obey and serve. In modern, secular contexts, it’s very seldom that I hear obedience and docility cited as prerequisites to leadership or management of others. Kindness, yes, but yieldingness, not often.
The non-specifically religious context where I’ve seen it most beautifully praised is Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft. Becoming a maker of things, he argues, means being mastered by reality, “The tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.” Or, as he puts it in a longer passage:
In any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian, one submits to things that have their own intractable ways. Such hardness is at odds with the ontology of consumerism, which seems to demand a different conception of reality. The philosopher Albert Borgmann offers a distinction that clarifies this: he distinguishes between commanding reality and disposable reality, which corresponds to “things” versus “devices.” The former convey meaning through their own inherent qualities, while the latter answer to our shifting psychic needs.”
Kristin’s time at the convent, Crawford’s time with motorcycles both offer the chance to see the limits of our own wills. We are truthful when we are docile to reality, be it physical or moral reality. For her sake and for the sake of those she will command, Kristin must be able to yield to what (and Who) is true, rather than let her will create an alternate reality.
