Leah Libresco's Blog, page 5

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. 

Read the whole thing at Deseret

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.

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…

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.

Read the whole thing…

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. 

Read the rest at First Things

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.

Read the whole thing at The New Atlantis

Covid, Vulnerability, and a Miasma Mindset

The New Atlantis convened a slate of writers for a symposium on lessons to learn from covid. My contribution to the “Beyond the State of Exception” symposium is “Bad Air,” a mediation on aerosols, ventilation, and vulnerability.

We’re used to starting with a premise of safety and sterility. The goal of our policy and our private precautions is to return us to that baseline of nothingness.

The artist Anicka Yi uses scents as her medium, and, as she told the New York Times in an interview, she thought about how to replicate the crisp nothing that people expect as the marker of both safety and luxury. “I talk a lot about how power has no odor,” Yi explained. “This is why you should not be smelling any odors when you walk into a gallery in Chelsea, or when you walk into a bank. These are places of power and sterility.”

[…]

We are all vulnerable, open systems. Our lungs are not, at least topologically speaking, interior organs. They are part of our surface — more like the nakedness of our faces than the tucked-away security of a liver. Our public health must start from the premise that we are present to the world, and total retreat is not an option. Then we will have the freedom and clarity to decide how best to face a lively, dangerous, and beautiful world.

R ead the whole thing at The New Atlantis

The Green Knight and the Elderly Gunman

First Things asked contributors for the best film they saw in 2021, and my husband and I both picked films by David Lowery. My choice was The Green Knight, and (once I had dibsed it) Alexi chose The Old Man and the Gun. Here’s an excerpt from my reflection:

To call it an adaptation of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight would be inaccurate. It’s a wrestling match with the tale, and with the ideal of chivalry itself. I can’t recommend it for teen viewers, as this is a decidedly unchaste Gawain. But it’s a good movie to see with friends, provided you watch it early enough in the evening that you have time for at least an hour of argument afterward. Lowery’s Camelot is a fading kingdom. His protagonist is himself green, not yet knighted, and not ready to live up to the demands of knighthood, marriage, or any vocation of sustained faithfulness and sacrifice. When he answers the Green Knight’s Christmas challenge, the film’s Gawain is hoping this fight will change something in him. In his subsequent quest, he’s still seeking a great act, worthy of song and story, big enough to swallow up his life of persistent sin and broken promises. He hopes, like one of Flannery O’Connor’s characters, that if he can’t be a saint, “[he] could be a martyr if they killed [him] quick.” Not everything in the film was satisfying, but it took serious questions seriously. 

Alexi’s choice was the based-on-a-true-story tale of elderly bank robber Forrest Tucker.

Unlike the hapless not-quite-a-knight Gawain, Tucker knows exactly what he wants to be doing and relishes the life he’s chosen. He follows a chivalric code of sorts, living as the last cowboy outlaw or gentleman thief. Does that mean he’s found the honor Gawain is seeking? The film offers occasional glimpses of the damage Tucker does to those who stay in his life longer than his bemusedly charmed victims. Elisabeth Moss appears in a single, crucial scene as a daughter Tucker doesn’t even know he has. Lowery lets us enjoy a venerable rogue reflecting on his picaresque life, while leaving open the question of what it would take for such a man to be part of a family or a society

Read the whole thing at First Things

Books I Hope to Read in 2022

I wrapped up 2021 with 10/11 of the books on my reading list finished. (I had ambitions of at least starting to read Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy on December 31st, but instead I took a third trimester nap). I can live with that.

Past my official list, I read 117 books in total (34.5k pages) and the numbers will probably go down again this year, with my second daughter due in February. And, more to the point, my toddler is very insistent that when we read together, I read a book from her shelf, not mine.

I still like making these lists, because they give me permission to prioritize these books over other things. By default, my reading plans are set by the schedule of library holds coming in, so being reminded that I wanted to make time for these books, and that I’ve set them an artificial deadline, helps me choose them.

This year’s list is definitely shaped by books I’ve found through my Other Feminisms substack project. I’m looking forward to the Kittay in particular. So, without further ado:

Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency by Eva Feder Kittay Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America by Evelyn Nakano Glenn Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births by Michelle Millar Fisher Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by Claudia Goldin The Virtues of Limits by David McPherson The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture: The Cadaver, the Memorial Body, and the Recovery of Lived Experience by Brent Dean Robbins The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World by Ran Abramitzky Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church by Michael Philip Penn The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics by Andrew Willard Jones Sun Slower, Sun Faster by Meriol Trevor Brisbane by by Eugene Vodolazkin

And I got a lovely gift over Christmas of Malcolm Guite’s Word in the Wilderness.

It’s a collection of poems, one per day for the seasons of Lent and Easter. I’m grateful to have a small daily practice of prayer and of beauty, especially as many traditional Lenten penances don’t work with a newborn.

(Arguably a list of planned reading for the year also doesn’t work with a newborn + toddler, but time will tell! I know the list will help me get to some of them I’d otherwise miss. The question is: Which ones?)

My Favorite Books of 2021

I read in two homes, across a move. I read mostly library books, across three different states where I have borrowing privileges. I read very very little on planes, between covid and a toddler who spent most of a flight trying to steal my mask off my face. I read aloud, and I do a very good voice for The Bear Snores On.

These books, in roughly chronological order, were my favorites.

The Friendship of Christ by Robert Hugh Benson

My husband and I pick out a readaloud book for our Sunday spirtual reading, and we began the book with this new edition from Oak and Linden Press. The book was simply written and moving—we incorporated it into our chaplaincy work with Catholic students. And there is something refreshing about reading a spiritual book from over 100 years ago and seeing how un-novel your questions are.

Perfectly Human: Nine Months with Cerian by Sarah C. Williams

Williams tells the story of her daughter Cerian’s short life. Early on in her pregnancy, they learn that Cerian has a congenital condition that means she will be stillborn. Williams and her husband and their children have to figure out what different shape their love for their daughter will take. This meant a lot to me as a mother who has lost children before birth.

Here is an excerpt from an essay Williams wrote for Plough on prenatal screening:

As a practice, prenatal scanning both teaches and reinforces particular ways of thinking about the human person. It teaches the pregnant couple to ask: Is this child physically normal? This question is asked as if it were of primary importance. Whether or not the scan results reveal fetal abnormality, irrespective of whether a parent chooses to act in certain ways as a result of the information given, the practice makes everyone ask this question at a relatively early stage in the pregnancy.

What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics by O. Carter Snead

This was my favorite book of the year, especially if you’re judging by how many of my own pieces I tried to sneak citations of Snead into. Like Williams’s memoir, Snead’s book is about our culture of “expressive individualism” and how an emphasis on choice diminishes the humanity of those who aren’t able to choose. I shared an interview I did with Snead on my substack, Other Feminisms. And here’s one of the quotes that I kept coming back to:

Law and policy, animated by an anthropology of embodiment would view the mother as a vulnerable, dependent member of society, who is entitled to the protections and support of the network of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving that must exist for any human being to survive and flourish.

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

And now we’re into the “ripping good yarn” section of the list. This early history of SpaceX was thrilling to read. (There’s one scene in particular, when an engineer has to crawl into an imploding rocket body being transported by cargo plane, that is clearly awaiting film adaptation). The book is a real mix of joyful and stomach-turning moments. People get to do things right instead of “the way we’ve always done them.” But then you start hitting the list of SpaceX divorces and feeling sick about what a culture of total commitment means for families. It’s a fascinating story, well told.

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman

Also a ripping good yarn (no no, hear me out). Here, one of the most thrilling scenes is when an inspector realizes that the Statue of Liberty is rusting through and is in danger of total structural collapse. Engineering and chemistry to the rescue! Almost everything we rely on is build with rust in mind (or else, we can’t rely on it for long). I loved learning about the design choices and work of maintenance that keeps buildings standing and pipes running.

Chosen Country by James Pogue

Pogue found a space for himself at the Bundy standoff and has a sharply observed, thoughtful book. There’s nothing pat about his portraits of the militiamen he meets or their politics. It’s not a book you can wave as an answer to what is dividing the country. I liked it because it reminded me how dense the lives behind any news story are.

The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought by Mara H. Benjamin

This is a book I plan to return to for Other Feminisms, and one that fits nicely into conversation with Snead. Benjamin is offering an understanding of what it means to be human that doesn’t start with negative freedom, but positive duties. While Jewish men have their days and their bodies shaped by their halachic obligations, women’s work carries a different weight. Instead of binding their arms with tefillin, women jut out a hip to carry a child. But in both cases, Benjamin sees who we are defined by whom and what we are burdened by. It was a moving book and very alien to mainstream individualism.

The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope

I always close the year with less fiction on the list than I would wish. Vespertine and The Mirror Season also stood out to me (though the latter has a sexual assault that is handled well but is tough to read, so I feel like it needs a note when I recommend it).

But Perilous Gard is the one I’m most excited to share with others. I am a tremendous fan of 1) Tam Lin retellings with 2) genuinely inhumane fey and 3) a world that rewards both gentleness and stubbornness. I loved it and I believed it. (I also enjoyed Pope’s The Sherwood Ring).

Finally, I want to mention three books I got to cover in more detail through book reviews. I reviewed The Deep Places, Ross Douthat’s Lyme memoir, for National Review (“Becoming Literate in Suffering”) and I reviewed two books on disability and design (What Can a Body Do? and Making Disability Modern) for Plough (“Spaces for Every Body”). All three books were excellent.

And if you’re interested, my favorite books from last year are listed here.