Leah Libresco's Blog, page 18
February 11, 2016
Speaking in Rhode Island tonight & how to have me visit your school
Tonight, I’m giving a talk on my book Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Answer on “Lessons in Prayer from an Atheist Convert” at Portsmouth Abbey in Rhode Island. The full logistical details are here, and the event description is: Leah Libresco, a popular atheist blogger whose conversion to Catholicism became a topic [Read More...]
February 10, 2016
Repeating Last Year’s Lent
I’m doing the same thing this year for Lent as I did last year: Giving up jaywalking Trying contemplative prayer Mostly on the grounds that both were still frustrating by the end of last year’s Lent, so I figure there might be more to learn from both. Not jaywalking left me on tiptoe at curb, [Read More...]
February 9, 2016
What Free Time Can Buy
Simcha Fisher has a great reflection on why she stopped homeschooling, and what she gained and lost when she sent her kids to school. This is the loss that most stood out to me: We don’t get to choose how to spend our time. This is the one thing that makes me really miss home school. We [Read More...]
February 5, 2016
7QT: Kabbalah Meet-Cutes, Substitute Mourners, and Vocational Opportunities
— 1 — The nice thing about being noisy about your hobbyhorses is that your friends wind up acting as your personal clipping service. That’s how I heard about these three friends who have been living together for 50 years. “We thought we’d be there two or three years and somebody would get married or [Read More...]
February 1, 2016
Advice on Persisting in Prayer with the Caritas Podcast
Last week, I climbed the curbside snowbanks to meet up with the women of Caritas, a Catholic podcast, and the audio from our conversation on how to persist in prayer is up now! In the introductory segment, I talk a little about my college debate community, and I was back in New Haven for a reunion [Read More...]
January 28, 2016
Unfiltered isn’t the Same as Authentic
Given my love of the anti-entropic call to arms of Diane Duane’s So You Want to be a Wizard, I guess I’m an easy mark for John Gardner’s description of good art in On Moral Fiction: But trivial art has no meaning or value except in the shadow of more serious art, the kind of art that [Read More...]
January 26, 2016
Conducting Surveys at the March for Life
Friday afternoon, I went out to the March for Life to survey the protesters for FiveThirtyEight, and you can read about who came and what kind of post-post-Roe world they envision here: The majority of the marchers weren’t protesting abortion simply as an abstract, political problem. Seventy-two percent of the people I surveyed told me [Read More...]
January 20, 2016
My Recipes for Scruffy Hospitality
An Anglican priest in Knoxville, TN has a great exhortation to offer scruffy hospitality to friends, instead of keeping your doors closed until you can be a startlingly excellent host. Scruffy hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home. Scruffy [Read More...]
January 19, 2016
Audio is up from my Building the Benedict Option talk in Boston
I had a wonderful time in Boston last week, talking about some of our Benedict Option efforts here in DC, and some of my starter kit ideas for beginning to build closer ties in your own community. (The simplest one: serve one more snack at the end of events, to give people an excuse to [Read More...]
January 15, 2016
7QT: Catapults, Chimes, and Cosplaying Kids
— 1 — I’ve been making some progress on the books I earmarked to read in 2016, but I had to make time for a book titled Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon, which was pretty much everything I hoped it would be. Here’s a passage from early in the book: I got off [Read More...]
