Leah Libresco's Blog, page 16

Christian Pop Is Oh So Peppy

Over at my day job, I’ve done an analysis of contemporary Christian music and traditional shape-note hymns. I took a look at the last five years of Billboard’s year-end top 50 Christian songs1 to see whether Christian pop is unrelentingly cheerful. I looked at pairs of concepts across the entire collection of lyrics2 (life and [Read More...]

Christian Ethics: If you understand, I’m explaining wrong…

I’ve gone on from borrowing books from my fiancé to borrowing books from my fiancé’s family, and I’ve just finished reading Stanley Hauerwas’s Resident Aliens: A Provocative Christian Assessment of Culture and Ministry for People Who Know that Something is Wrong.  One of the passages I found most striking is Hauerwas’s argument below that Christian ethics should be [Read More...]

7QT: Moms, Pacifist Pilots, and other superheroes

— 1 — I’m very blessed to have a friend who joined the Dominican Sisters at Hawthorne, and she reminded me to let you all know that they have some retreats coming up!  It’s the kind of thing that is definitely worth looking at, even if you don’t long to be a nun. I’m very [Read More...]

Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” And The Fertility Of Forgiveness

I’m at First Things, reviewing Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade,” which does a remarkable job telling a story about a marriage that is wounded, but not unmade, by betrayal. “Hold Up” is still dreamlike, more of an imagined, idealized anger than actual rage. Beyoncé doesn’t take second swings at her targets, she seems to have no particular [Read More...]

Hedgehogs of Redemption and the Comedy of Grace

One of my friends has been coordinating a series of Narnia book clubs, and, prompted by our discussion of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, I’ve written a piece for Aleteia on a particularly farcical gift of grace in that book. The most pleased of the lot was the other lion, who kept running about [Read More...]

7QT: Remixes, Underwear, & Fake Fingers

— 1 — I’m not going to make you wait for it (wait for it).  The video of the Hamilton cast doing their relyricized opening number to tell the tale of Sweeney Todd is up! (Part of the annual Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS benefit) — 2 — And, in another interesting bit of Hamilton reworking, [Read More...]

Mercy, Justice, and How To Tell The Difference

I haven’t blogged at all about Pope Francis’s Apostolic exortation Amoris Laetitia, for the simple reason that I haven’t yet read it! So I’m not in a position to analyze it myself or to evaluate other people’s takes on it. But Eve Tushnet wrote a reflection for First Things which opens with a good analysis [Read More...]

Running the Stats on Shakespeare!

Shakespeare’s 400th death day comes up this weekend, so I’ve done some analysis for FiveThirtyEight on which of his plays wind up taught outside English class (and offered a few recommendations of my own): Psychology students most often encounter Shakespeare’s great madmen: King Lear and Hamlet. Perhaps they’re the ones to blame for the more [Read More...]

When a Wedding Guide Leaves Out The Wedding Night

I’m at First Things, covering the unexpected gap I’ve found in the wedding planning books I’ve been reading. I became engaged at Easter, and, as I’ve started planning our wedding with my fiancé, I’ve noticed a suspicious lacuna in the wedding how-to’s I’ve picked up. I would have thought, after one magazine’s handbook covered strategies for [Read More...]

Fighting Weaponized Acedia

Commonweal has my double review of Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire by R.J. Snell and Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll.  Why review those two book alongside each other? I’m so glad that you asked. Slots, video poker, and other gambling machines are often described [Read More...]