Leah Libresco's Blog, page 27

Good Fights, Like Good Friendships, Are A Long-Term Promise

Monique Ocampo runs a series of interviews with Catholic women on Wednesdays and I’m her guest this week.  I’ve posted a snippet of our discussion below, but you can read the full Q&A at her place. How do you balance working in news with apologetics? Most of the time, there’s no balancing act at all [Read More...]

Concussion Tests and a Voting Mess [538]

Here’s the roundup of what I’ve been working on at FiveThirtyEight over the last week:   The ‘One Person, One Vote’ Case Relies On Statistics That Nobody Has The plaintiffs are challenging the usual method (counting total number of people living in a district) and are asking that states use the total number of eligible [Read More...]

Letting Prayer Lead from Self to Other

Tonight I’m speaking in NYC at First Things at 6p.  I hope to see some of you there or next week when I do a Theology on Tap in Boston on June 2nd. As part of the Patheos Book Club, I got to do a Q&A with Will Duquette about Arriving at Amen.  Will’s a great guy, [Read More...]

The Publishing Milestone that No One Mentions

This might be the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in the midst of launching my first book.  Last week, I reposted one of those perennial facebook memes: Since I was reading The Little Book of Restorative Justice by Howard Zehr, I typed up the appropriate page 45 sentence: To use an image that is [Read More...]

Accidental Stylites and the Benedict Option

This weekend, I’m hosting an in-person discussion of “the Benedict Option” — ways for modern Christians to root their faith so that they can wind up living it more fully and more joyfully.  Rod Dreher is the biggest promoter of the idea, which takes its name from the Benedictine monasteries that acted as centers of [Read More...]

Running the (Terrible for Catholics) Numbers on Conversion

The Pew Religious Landscape Survey gave the chance to write some code and run the numbers on religious churn, retention, and conversions for my day job at FiveThirtyEight.  Here are a few highlights: Evangelical Protestants Are The Biggest Winners When People Change Faiths The numbers presented by Pew help describe current patterns, but they don’t [Read More...]

7QT: Not Breathing, Not Marrying, and Opening Beers With Your Teeth

— 1 — So, remember how I mentioned that the last question at my book talk in DC was about transhumanism?  Well, here’s a particularly amusing body augmentation: If you’re a rugby player, you’re going to take a lot of hits — and you might even lose a tooth or two. Rather than replace those [Read More...]

Using N-Dimensional Spaces to Learn to Think About God

I had a great time speaking about Arriving at Amen at the Catholic Information Center last night (especially during the Q&A section — there were a couple I’m still mulling) and the audio from that event should wind up online eventually. Plus, you can see me live (and ask questions of your own — the last [Read More...]

Talking to Vox Nova about Conversion and Learning from Others

I got to chat with Jeannine Pitas of Vox Nova about my new book, Arriving at Amen and some of her more wide-ranging questions about religion.  Here’s a teaser of what she asked: Q: On a more general note, what do you think that Catholics can learn from atheists? In turn, what can atheists learn [Read More...]

Desiring Abundance of Life, Not Just Absence of Sin

Ben Kuhn has a great post up on strategies for inviting (and retaining) new kinds of people to a group that you run.  Ben is writing specifically about effective altruism, an interest of mine, too, but I think his thoughts generalize pretty well. Hands down, this was my favorite thing that he said: Get interested in [Read More...]