Leah Libresco's Blog, page 18
February 17, 2016
Finding Ways to Let Lent Interrupt
It’s been a week since Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, and, if you notice you’re having a little trouble remembering that it’s Lent (aside from the different colors at church), you might want to take a look through Eve Tushnet’s Lent A-Z to see if any of her thoughts are fruitful for you. [Read More...]
February 16, 2016
On Beyond Valentine’s Day!
I’ve got two great essays to share now that Valentine’s Day is over, and you have to go on muddling through how to offer and receive love without quite so much guidance from Hallmark. First up, in First Things, Alexi Sargeant has a great piece on dating and courtship, and the kind of deliberate work couples [Read More...]
February 13, 2016
My Statistician’s Guide to Valentine’s Day
I’ve written two pieces at FiveThirtyEight that may be of interest to those of you celebrating Valentine’s Day this weekend. First up: The Cheapskate’s Guide To Buying Flowers For Valentine’s Day If you bought your roses on Feb. 10 and took good care of them, you might still have a bouquet to bestow on Feb. [Read More...]
February 12, 2016
7QT: Good books, fake books, and the best job in the world
— 1 — I’m excited about the discovery of gravity waves, and here’s the most delightful thing I learned in the process of reading about the discover (via The New Yorker) The LIGO team includes a small group of people whose job is to create blind injections—bogus evidence of a gravitational wave—as a way of keeping [Read More...]
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...]
