Leah Libresco's Blog, page 12
March 8, 2018
I Was A Nine Year Old Stoic…
I reviewed several books of New Stoicism for Fare Forward, and discussed my own Stoic-influenced childhood. Here’s an excerpt:
I loved Stoicism for two reasons, one petty and one profound. I liked that Stoicism seemed to make me stronger (and, thus, to my thinking then, better) than other people. While the other kids were upset, I was able to endure, and be unmastered by misfortune. (Stoicism was a pretty good way to get through the social cruelties of middle and high schools). But the other reason I liked Stoicism was because it was true. Hunger was basically a warning light, prompting me to eat. But, once the message had been received, there was no reason to leave the klaxon blaring when I couldn’t do anything about it. Leaning into hunger wasn’t just a recipe for frustration, it felt like buying into an untruth.
No matter how much I wanted it, I couldn’t summon food on the boat. Wallowing in my feelings seemed to imply that they were really hooked up to the causal nature of the world. But being upset about my inability to resolve such situations was as silly as feeling upset because I couldn’t walk through walls. Stoicism was a way of realigning my model of the world and my agency within it with the world as it truly is.
I joined Fare Forward‘s editor, Peter Blair, and one of the other contributors, Susannah Black, who had written on New Urbanism and the New Jerusalem for the issue for a panel discussion hosted by NYU.
We both spoke on our articles, and then had a lively time fielding questions from Peter and from the audience. You can listen to the full event below:
March 7, 2018
Death and Dappled Hope: Meditations on Biden’s Memoir
Sustained by his family’s love and his love for them, Biden can carry the weight of tragedy and offer it as a gift to others. At the beginning of the book, he describes visiting the family of Wenjian Liu, a police officer murdered on duty, and offering the widow his personal phone number. He tells her that there will come a time when she feels that all her friends have returned to normal life, and she doesn’t know whether she can or should reach out to them from the depths of her grief. If she feels that way, Biden tells her, she should call him.
[…]
Near the end of the book, after his son’s death, Biden barely needs words in order to be a comfort to others. He chooses to visit Emanuel AME Church (privately, without the press) after members of the parish were shot by a white supremacist. Biden writes, “This congregation was hurting and in need, and I knew my showing up so soon after my son’s death could be some source of strength for the Emanuel family.” He has learned that the public’s knowledge of his losses allows others to open up to him, free from the burden to be silent, stoic, or polite. He is a walking icon of Our Lady of Sorrows, offering the gift of tears.
But the heartbreaking thing about the book is that—for all Biden’s generosity to others in their mourning—his own family’s generosity and love seem to be somewhat thwarted, as they rally together to care for [his son] Beau.
February 19, 2018
Fr. Thomas Joseph White on Substitutionary Atonement
I’ve finished the first book on my list of intended reading for 2018! The honor goes to Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P.’s The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism. I’ve also made a start on Middlemarch, but I’m reading it with friends, and we’re not scheduled to finish till May. The next one I finish will probably be Thy Will Be Done: Letters to Persons in the World by St. Francis de Sales (I’ve organized a book club for March).
One of the particularly lovely passages in White’s book came in his discussion of atonement and the Passion:
The passion is not a mystery of divine wrath and vengeance but of divine justice, mercy, and reparation. There is no problem with the use of the language of “substitutionary atonement,” but there is a question of what this language connotes. Jesus’s substitutionary atonement for our sins is above all something positive, not something negative. He substitutes his love, his justice, and his obedience there where the human race has lacked love, justice, and obedience.
I met Fr. White through the Dominican House of Studies, and for anyone in D.C., I’d definitely recommend praying with the friars (and getting to meet them) by joining them for Evening Prayer. For those outside D.C., you can check to see if the Thomistic Institute is planning any events near you!
February 4, 2018
Speaking on my Conversion in Chicago
On February 8th, I’ll have the pleasure of visiting Loyola University Chicago to deliver their annual Newman Lecture. The Lecture, presented by the Joan And Bill Hank Center For The Catholic Intellectual Heritage.
The Cardinal Newman Lecture Series is named after the great 19th century English prelate who wrote very movingly about his intellectual journey toward Roman Catholicism in his spiritual autobiography, Apologia pro vita sua (1864). Newman’s work helped later generations of Catholics and Catholic converts map out ways to understand the datum of religious faith in light of the contemporary issues facing modern life.
Honoring this engagement with the Catholic tradition, CCIH will invite scholars each spring to recount their own discovery (or rediscovery) of the Catholic intellectual heritage in light of their ongoing scholarship.
My talk will be on my conversion, and is titled “From Javert to Jesus: An Atheist’s Conversion.”
I’m looking forward to meeting the students and to trying to stay completely swathed in scarves any moment I’m outside and at the mercy of Chicago’s February weather.
January 22, 2018
Aziz Ansari’s hookup was a game of Russian roulette
If Aziz Ansari is reading all the thinkpieces about him, he must feel most ill-served by his allies. “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader” wrote Bari Weiss for the New York Times, exonerating Ansari in a singularly insulting way.
It’s unreasonable, Weiss and others write, to expect Ansari and other men to be able to know if they’re scaring or upsetting their one-night-stands. The solution isn’t for men to pay attention to women’s non-verbal cues, she writes, but for women to be much more aggressive in fending off men who make them feel uncomfortable or unsafe.
For all the worry about women defining themselves as snowflakes or victims, the defense offered to Ansari sounds much more cossetting than comforting.
What virtuous man would feel relieved to be told he is powerless to avoid harming the women he takes to bed?
January 17, 2018
Asking Catholic Women About Vocations, Prayer, Confession, and NFP
I partnered with America to do a series of sidebars, looking through the data in the survey of 1500 Catholic women in America that the magazine produced in partnership with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Here are links to my four short pieces:
The Prayer Lives of Catholic Women
We asked women about the circumstances in which they regularly prayed. A third (33 percent) of the women in our sample did not engage in any of the three practices of regular prayer that we asked about: prayer when waking up, prayer when going to bed and prayer before meals. A little over a quarter (28 percent) participated in at least one of these practices, and a fifth (19 percent) relied on all three.
Sustaining prayer practices of this type were correlated with age and Mass attendance. Millennials (44 percent) were twice as likely as pre-Vatican II Catholics (23 percent) to have none of these regular prayer practices.
How many Catholic women have considered religious vocations?
We asked the women who had never considered a vocation to the consecrated life what factors had influenced their thinking—what were the barriers between them and this way of life? The most frequently cited reason was the desire for a different vocation: to be a mother. Over half (56 percent) of the women who had never considered being a woman religious said that the longing for children was “very much” related to their choices.
What Catholic women believe about Mass attendance, confession and God’s existence
Participation in the sacrament of reconciliation (confession) is also infrequent. A quarter of respondents (27 percent) went to confession at least once a year. A higher share (38 percent) reported that they had “never” been to confession. This is higher than might be expected, as confession in most dioceses is required prior to making one’s first Communion.
What Catholic women actually believe about Natural Family Planning
We asked the women who used N.F.P. about what factors were most important to them when they decided how to space births. Financial concerns were some of the most commonly cited: 38 percent of women said it was very important to them. The next most frequently cited reasons were not wanting more children (34 percent) and a woman’s relationship with her husband (33 percent).
January 8, 2018
The couple that writes Star Wars takes together…
My husband and I enjoyed seeing The Last Jedi, and we both wrote up appreciations of the film. At Aleteia, I wrote “Kylo Ren: The Star Wars not-quite-villain whose temptations are familiar”
The combination of great power and great irresponsibility would be enough to make for a challenging antagonist, but Kylo Ren is more than just a boss for our heroes to defeat. He’s a reminder of what temptations we have to resist to be heroes and saints. People doing evil more often look like Kylo Ren than they look like Darth Vader.
Evil isn’t glamorous. It isn’t underscored by John Williams or versified by John Milton. It doesn’t sweep down a hallway, cape rippling, basso profundo voice booming. Evil is a privation of good, a rejection of something, and it is always a little smaller, and a little more tenuous than the whole that it gave up. Kylo Ren is chasing something that doesn’t exist, that is willfully always diminishing itself.
And Alexi wrote on how the new film handles hope and heroism, “Martydom in The Last Jedi“
It’s easy to see Holdo as a study in female leadership running up against boys’ club mentalities. It’s also easy to be reminded of great classical generals, like the canny Fabius Maximus, who outlasted Hannibal’s superior forces with delay tactics and guerilla maneuvers. In Livy’s history of Rome, he records Fabius advising a younger general: “Never mind if they call your caution timidity, your wisdom sloth, your generalship weakness; it is better that a wise enemy should fear you than that foolish friends should praise.” Holdo embodies this counsel because she’s unafraid to seem cowardly or overcautious if her actions can give the Resistance a fighting chance.
For me, though, Holdo’s storyline most vividly recalled St. Thomas More’s in A Man for All Seasons. The play (like the film based on it) is a meditation on what martyrdom is—and what it isn’t.
Finally, Alexi has one more piece on Rogue One, specifically on the choice to resurrect Peter Cushing as a CGI-revenant. He argues against that choice at The New Atlantis, in what is my favorite piece of his writing of the year.
January 4, 2018
Mary McCarthy, Masks, and Identity
I read Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps, after reading B.D. McClay’s Commonweal essay in appreciation of her work. This novel of linked short stories what what Barbara recommended I begin with. (I had forgotten I’d read McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence). Here’s one passage I particularly enjoyed:
Perhaps at last she had found him, the one she kept looking for, the one who could tell her what she was really like. For this she had gone to palmists and graphologists, hoping not for a dark man or a boat trip, but for some quick blaze of gypsy insight that would show her her own lineaments. If she once knew, she had no doubt that she could behave perfectly; it was merely a question of finding out. How, she thought, can you act upon your feelings if you don’t know what they are? As a little girl whispering to a young priest in the confessional she had sometimes felt sure. The Church could classify it all for you. If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts, or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good. Protestants, like her father, were neutral; they lived in a gray world beyond good and evil. But when as a homely high-school girl, she had rejected the Church’s filing system, together with her aunt’s illiterate morality, she had given away her sense of herself. For a while she had believed that it wad a matter of waiting until you grew older and your character was formed; then you would be able to recognize it as easily as a photograph. But she was now twenty-four, and had heard other people say she had a strong personality; she herself however was still in the dark. This hearty stranger in the green shirt—perhaps he could really tell whether she was in love with her husband. It was like the puzzle about the men with marks on their foreheads: A couldn’t know whether his own forehead was marked, but B and C knew, of course, and he could, if he were bright, deduce it from their behavior.
As it happens, the next book I read after McCarthy was the rulebook for Masks, a superhero RPG (my husband is planning a campaign). The game’s mechanics aren’t so far from what Meg Sargent imagines in the passage quoted above.
Players create heroes whose statistics are based on their self-image (how do they feel like a savior, a danger, a freak, etc.) and other players (or non-player characters controlled by the storyteller) can alter you character’s capacities by based on how they perceive your character, just as Meg hoped.
January 2, 2018
Books I Plan to Read in 2018
This year, I read all but one of the books on my Books to Read in 2017 list. Spiritual Letters by Dom John Chapman is in progress (so it doesn’t have its checkmark yet), but I didn’t read The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods by A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. for the second year in a row, so it’s coming off the list for this year.
Overall, I read 167 books (just over 50k pages) over 2017, a pretty high share of which were from my local library, thanks to my Library Extension plug-in, that checks if any book I look at on Amazon is in the library system, so I can put it on hold.
I’m also amused to report that Goodreads told me both which book I read that was the most commonly read by other people (A Wrinkle in Time) and which book was read by only me, in all of Goodreads: The Oxford Movement in America: Or, Glimpses of Life in an Anglican Seminary. I found it in a used book store in Staunton, Virginia (during a trip to the American Shakespeare Center).
I like making a to-read list every year, not as a set of tasks to be accomplished, but as a way of giving myself permission to prioritize these books, that I might otherwise put off as I tackle other things. So, without further ado, here’s my 2018 list:
C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences — Various
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace — Tamar Adler
The Baron in the Trees — Italo Calvino
Grant — Ron Chernow
Middlemarch — George Eliot
Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined — Michael Frame and Amelia Urry
The Shadow of His Wings: The True Story of Fr. Gereon Goldmann, OFM — Gereon Goldmann
Athens, Arden, Jerusalem — Kate Havard & Paul T. Wilford
Notre Dame de Paris/The Hunchback of Notre Dame — Victor Hugo
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World — Steven Johnson
Thy Will Be Done: Letters to Persons in the World — St. Francis de Sales
Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential Writings — Maria Skobtsova
The Light of Christ — Fr. Thomas Joseph White
The Vision of the Soul — James Matthew Wilson
Disagreeing Virtuously — Olli-Pekka Vainio
This year, I’d like to try doing some daily spiritual reading (and there’s certainly enough here to fill a year), which leaves me with one small problem. I’m vegetarian, so I don’t fast from meat on Fridays (and other food-based practices haven’t worked well for me). I’ve taken on a special time of spiritual reading, but, if I’m doing it everyday, it doesn’t work so well as a Friday practice. Any suggestions for what I might take on instead?
December 12, 2017
Origen on “Lead Us Not Into Temptation”
The internet (and the Pope) are discussing the Lord’s Prayer plea that God “not lead us into temptation” which brings up the obvious question: why would God lead us into temptation—is it a trap?
It’s not a new question, and, when our monthly spiritual reading bookclub picked up Tertullian, Cyprian, And Origen On The Lord’s Prayer, Origen had some fascinating meditations on this request (translated as “Do not bring us into testing”).
The utility of testing is thus something like this: through testing the things which our souls have admitted, unknown to anyone except God, unknown even to ourselves, are made manifest, so that we should know longer be unaware of what kind of people we are, but may recognize this and, should we so wish, perceive our own evil and give thanks for the good things that have been made manifest to us through the testing. It is set forth by the Lord in Job, and is written in Deuteronomy, that testing comes upon us so that our true nature may be revealed to ourselves, and so that we may discern what is hidden in our hearts. The passages are as follow: “Do you think that I should have answered you except to reveal you as righteous” (Job 40:3) and, in Deuteronomy: “He afflicted you and starved you and fed you with manna, and he led you astray in the desert, where there were biting snakes and scorpions and drought, so that what was in your heart might be made known” (Deut. 8:3,15,2).
As Origen discusses it, testing and temptation are a little like apocalypse: in the sense that they are an unveiling, with all the disruption that may accompany exposure. Earlier in the text, Origin gives a much more vivid example of this sort of revelatory testing (the story referenced is from Numbers 11):
Having desires and longings, the mixed throng among the children of Israel, and the children of Israel with them, wept. It is clear that as long as they did not possess what they desired they would have no satisfaction, and their passions would not cease. But the merciful and good God, in granting their desire, did not wish to grant it in such a way that their desire might continue in them. Therefore he says that they should eat meat not for one day only, for should they have partaken of the meat for a short while their passion would remain and the soul be kindled and inflamed by it. Nor does he grant them what they desired for two days. Since he willed that they should be surfeited with it, he utters what, to anyone who understands, is actually a threat, though it seems gratifying to them: “You shall not spend five days only eating meat, nor twice that, nor even twice that, but you shall spend a whole month eating meat, until what you though so good is coming out your nostrils, together with your loathsome passion, and your culpable and base desire. In this way I will release you from desires in your lives, so that when you emerge you may be pure from all desires, and remember the suffering that you underwent in order to be released from it.
In Origen’s writing, testing and temptation seems a little like an earthly form of Purgatory, where the faults were have kept secret even from ourselves become gross and obvious, so we can no longer avoid an explicit choice between our love of our sins and our love of God. To ask to be spared this is to ask to see and mend these errors sooner, so that God does not need to lead us into grotesqueries (meat coming out our nostrils!) to show us what we ought to be already.
