Leah Libresco's Blog, page 19

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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

Using Goodhart’s Law to Find Happiness

My parish kicked off its Adult Sunday School (taught by Dominican friars) this past week with a class on happiness. We started off going through a discussion of all the things happiness is not (wealth, power, fame, honor, etc) and I liked some of the reasoning given about how you could recognize these as not [Read More...]

Speaking on the Benedict Option in Boston & Two Questions

I’m in Boston tomorrow night (Jan 12) for a Theology on Tap on the topic of Accidental Stylites: The Benedict Option and the American Church I’m going to talk about the Benedict Option movement (ways for modern Christians to root their faith in community and friends so that they can wind up living it more [Read More...]

Books on deck for me in 2016

According to my Goodreads account, I read 260 books this past year (that comprised a total of 81.203 pages).  And sixteen of those were books I specifically set out to read in last year’s Books on Deck post. Overall, I think it worked out great to make a list of books I meant to get around to, [Read More...]

My version of the ball drop starts 1600 feet in the air

Over at FiveThirtyEight, I did a little high school physics math to see how high you’d have to start to really drop the New Year’s Eve ball.  And what would happen when it hit the ground. The ball drop in Times Square happens too slowly for my taste. Just before midnight, the LED-studded ball will inch [Read More...]

Lewis, Chesterton, and Card on Our Tolerance for Mystery

I had the pleasure of speaking at Doxacon (a scifi/fantasy convention for theology nerds) in November, and the audio of my talk (“Chesterton, Lewis, and Card on Worldbuilding and Our Tolerance of Mystery”) is now available for streaming!  Here’s the prècis: When a reader picks up a fantasy or science fiction novel, he or she [Read More...]

Praising the Little Way of Pratchett’s Heroes

As the year comes to an end, I’ve written an appreciation of Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, who passed away this year, for Aleteia.  He wrote fiercely moral characters, several of whom were icons of ethics for me. But the kind of sin that Granny talks about isn’t an indulgence in something harmless, [Read More...]