Leah Libresco's Blog, page 5
June 7, 2022
Asserting Individual Freedom from Individualism
I had the pleasure of reviewing American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York for First Things. The book is a legal history of the struggles of this Jewish enclave to run itself independently of the surrounding town. It’s a fascinating story, especially in the context of certain disagreements over post-liberalism.
As Stolzenberg and Myers describe it, the village was shaped by a clash between “illiberal liberalism” and “liberal illiberalism.” The surrounding community took the approach of “illiberal liberalism,” paying lip service to pluralism but unwilling to tolerate the “wrong” kind of community. The people of Kiryas Joel took the approach of “liberal illiberalism,” mustering the distinctively American rights system to carve out a space free of individualist values and the aspects of American culture that conflicted with their faith. The fights between the two began over zoning and multifamily housing, but soon shifted to their natural battleground: the schools.
Schools lie on the border between the family and the wider world. Both parents and teachers see it as their job to shape character, not just convey sterile facts, and they are right to do so. But when the values of families and the values of a country diverge, the school is the place these clashes come to a head.
May 16, 2022
The Long Wait for Weddings
As America geared up for a wedding boom in the summer of 2022, I wrote about the obstacles that disrupt weddings and other communal rites of passage in non-covid times.
No matter how stripped down the ceremony, people need to be able to plan travel. The people we love are too scattered for spontaneity. We want to be well knit into the fabric of our church, but too much of our lives lies outside the parish boundaries. It isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, but it makes it feel like we schedule the most sacred sacraments around secular concerns and scheduling. It’s a one-time version of families’ ongoing struggle to make sure Sunday worship isn’t crowded out by their children’s sports programs.
We had more flexibility to choose dates for marriage and baptism, but the service that is hardest to schedule is a funeral. Death comes on its own schedule. Even though a memorial service might wait for a month in order to accommodate all those who need to gather, grief does not wait for the convenient time.
May 9, 2022
A Better Way to Debate Abortion
Shortly after the draft Dobbs decision leaked, I wrote a piece for America, reflecting on the time I invited friends to come to my house and have a better fight about abortion.
In 2016, I opened my doors for what I expected would be the worst event I would ever host. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, my husband and I invited about a dozen pro-choice and pro-life friends over to eat cookies and talk about abortion.
I had been part of terrible conversations on this topic, online and off-line, and I knew I wanted something different. I had friends on both sides of the divide, and it was surreal to be in a position where we all thought the other side was complicit in grave evil.
I also asked the Other Feminisms community what readings they would recommend to set the table for a better conversation.
May 6, 2022
Family Policy Can’t Be Gender Neutral
For Mother’s Day, I wrote for Deseret on why gender neutral family policy tends to shortchange mothers.
In an uneventful pregnancy, a mother will still have a harder timechan than her partner as she navigates fatigue, nausea and pain. Drawing attention to these difficulties can feel like letting other women down — if women carry heavier burdens as parents, admitting to them gives employers an excuse to prefer men. But women aren’t helped by pretending to an equivalency that doesn’t exist.
Pregnancy, birth and recovery are not gender-neutral processes. Women need time to heal and financial cushions to care for their children. Mothers and fathers have unique responsibilities and gifts. Mothers carry the greater physical burden by nature; good fathers are distinguished by the way they choose to carry weight for their partner and their children. Mother’s Day is a fitting time to remember that if our family policy is just, it will not treat parents as interchangeable.
I also commented on family leave for a round up of pro-life, whole-life policy asks for Tish Harrison Warren’s column at the New York Times.
April 20, 2022
When Need Comes Knocking
As Ukrainian refugees streamed into Europe, people near and far looked for a way to help. I’m at Deseret, writing about one crowdsourced site for opening your hope to those in needs, and discussing what that practice can look like far from a war zone.
When need comes knocking, it changes the way we see the world around us. A spare room, an extra set of towels, the clothes at the bottom of the drawer that rarely get worn, each of these superfluities make our everyday life feel a little more spacious. We have some wiggle room in our own home, with our own possessions, to not worry about running out. But each “extra” also poses a question: Can I hold onto this for my own comfort when someone else has a greater need?
A pair of friends I know in Washington, D.C., have always made sure to budget so that they can afford an apartment with a guest room. They wanted to always be able to say “yes” to someone who needed a long-term place to stay on short notice — the kind of prolonged stay that would be hard to sustain if your guest were on your living room couch. They wanted to be able to make it imaginable that someone they knew could leave an abusive relationship, quit an exploitative job, come to a new city to look for work.
March 28, 2022
Rethinking Sex with Christine Emba
I got to interview Christine Emba about her new book Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. The full interview is embedded below, and the Institute for Family Studies ran an excerpt as part of their “Five Questions for…” series. We also had a lively conversation in the comments of Other Feminisms. Here’s an excerpt:
Sargeant: It feels like the intimacy of sex has been set apart as something that can cleaved off from all other intimacy. It feels like the contraceptive mindset has been extended from children to feelings. Every aspect of sex is supposed to be controllable and both partners are expected to make sure you can have sex without anything that would logically follow from [having] sex, like a baby. Now you’re also expected to kind of bring that contraceptive work to the logical emotional entanglements of sex.
That’s more complicated than taking a daily pill. It’s kind of an endless emotional practice. And then there’s guilt that you’ve made a promise to someone that you find yourself incapable of keeping—of not catching feelings. So just where do we get the idea that these parts are or should be severable from each other?
Emba: One of the chapters in this book is called “We Want to Catch Feelings” because honestly, in relationships the feelings are the fun part. The feelings are what we want. I think it’s also sort of a form of Cartesian dualism. The idea that the mind or the soul and the body are two completely separate things. It’s sort of understood in this materialist culture that what we do with our bodies should have no impact on our minds and our souls.
And I just don’t think that’s true, actually. Our bodies and our souls combine to make us human people. That’s kind of what being human is—to have feelings about how we move through the world and what we do with ourselves
Read more at IFS or watch the whole thing below.
February 12, 2022
The Olympic Disciplines that Destroy the Body
I’m at Deseret, making my case against a number of Winter Olympic sports that destroy bodies, rather than reveal their excellence. Ladies’ quads in figure skating are particularly destructive.
Quads don’t work for older skaters. The physics get hard once a skater is past puberty and begins to develop a woman’s body. Restrictive eating can forestall puberty and growth, but this strategy is abuse of the body, not celebration of its potential. Pushing a child’s body to the limits results in serious injuries that send them into retirement before they’re out of their teens. […]
More and more, the Olympics are a boondoggle for the host country, with massive buildings left to decay when the competition has passed. Athletes are too often treated as similarly disposable. A sport that treats them as something to be used up and discarded between competition cycles is a sport that falls short of what the Olympics should be.
Read the whole thing…
January 28, 2022
There’s No Neutral Answer to When Life Begins
For my first piece in Deseret News, I’m analyzing a line of argument in Dobbs, claiming that that the question of when life begins is beyond what government can answer. But this question isn’t uniquely the domain of religion—everyone needs to be able to furnish and defend an answer.
Where a loose consensus prevails, it is easy to imagine that we have left ethical and religious questions behind and are dealing with naked and incontestable facts. But this undersells how much philosophy and metaphysics are the foundation of our choices — even the ones that don’t feel like choices at all.
In many of the moral decisions we make, we have a strong sense of what is right, without having to appeal to first principles, religious or secular. We tend to struggle with finding the will to follow our conscience, not the initial problem of discerning what is right.
In the same way, it’s easy to catch or throw a ball without ever having studied the physics of how, exactly, the ball tumbles through the air. The physics are still real, whether or not we can rattle off the equations. But, in moral and material things, we often rely on a strong sense of what is true, without having to know why it is true.
January 25, 2022
Encanto and the Benedict Option
Encanto doesn’t have a conventional Disney villain, because the musical is about learning to live in safety, putting aside the bad habits that come from fear and scarcity. I covered the musical for First Things, with a particular emphasis on the parallel dangers for Christians.
The village is not so different from a Benedict Option enclave. And like any BenOp community, its members discover that refuge from external dangers is not enough to make them safe or happy. They must use their shelter well, and decide how to extend what they have received to others. [..]
The family’s fractures are magically reflected in their surroundings: The casita begins to show cracks, and starts to crumble. But even when the house is whole, there is already something slightly wrong. Even in safety, the Madrigals’ lives are shaped by fear—of the outside world, or of being worthless, or imperfect. This is the same challenge that faces those who are attracted to thick Christian community primarily as a refuge from the outside world, rather than as a means to live abundantly for God. The aim of a refuge is to make space to offer an open, joyful witness, not to pull up the ladder behind you. But it is difficult to break habits of fear and despair.
January 21, 2022
Sacrifice Is Not a Therapy
As the Omicron wave crested in January, many institutions tried to do more and seemed to assume that the more intrusive or inconvenient a restriction, the more powerful it was. I talk about why this is the wrong way to think about medicine at The New Atlantis.
They assume that our safety is proportional to the amount of effort we put in, perhaps even proportional to how much we’re willing to suffer. Throughout the pandemic, many safety precautions have treated Covid as though it were a moralistic slasher villain, visiting punishment on those who enjoy themselves. […]
The stories we tell about medicine imply that outcomes depend on the physical and moral strength of the doctor and patient. Cancer patients’ treatments are still frequently framed as a war, which may make patients reluctant to choose milder treatments over harsh chemotherapy. Abandoning the heavy artillery feels like conceding the fight.
No one, patient or practitioner, is too much to blame for struggling with these tradeoffs. In ordinary times, we take for granted the near-magical disproportionality of medical interventions. Many of the most powerful methods are nearly invisible to us: My baby’s risk of spina bifida is warded off with a pill the size of her second-trimester palm; the benefits of treated water accrue without experiencing any of the trouble of hauling or boiling it. The victories of public health infrastructure disappear into the background of everyday life.
