Leah Libresco's Blog, page 7

Why Pro-Life Catholics Should Get Vaccinated

In The New York Times, I made the case for pro-life Catholics to get covid vaccines, despite their dependence on cell lines derived from aborted children. Even people who are comfortable with the vaccines need to grapple with the question of how we make amends for our material cooperation with evil.

I’ve gotten both my shots and I strongly believe other Catholics should get vaccinated, too. But I don’t think those qualms are entirely misguided, and they’re not limited to vaccinations. When we reap the benefit of what we see as a past injustice, we are implicated in the original wrongdoing. We have to decide if our actions compound the original abuse and what kinds of reparations we must make.

The Jesuits of Georgetown University have been wrestling with a similar question of moral contamination. The order funded the school partly through the exploitation and sale of slaves. To make amends, the university has begun a fund-raising campaign to pay reparations to the descendants of those slaves. But a Georgetown professor still has to ask the same question as a someone rolling up his sleeve for the vaccine: Can I accept a benefit premised on someone else’s suffering?

Read the whole thing at The New York Times

The Cautionary Tale of WandaVision

WandaVision is an ambitious offering from the Marvel Industrial Complex, but it falls short of its potential. I reviewed the show for Mere Orthodoxy (in a way I hope was comprehensible even to non-watchers!). The show is ultimately about the consequences of the stories we tell about our lives.

The show uses the heightened style of a superhero story — as well as the genre conventions of sitcoms — to tell a big story about the quiet, internal work of mourning. Fantasy stories let us blow up our lives to heroic scale, to give small moments gravity.

Wanda plunges herself into American sitcom structures as a way of keeping grief at bay. In a sitcom, the world is safe— no trouble is allowed to be big enough to disrupt the show’s premise.

As the show unfolds, she must fend off internal and external attempts to take down the walls she’s built. Outside the town, a squadron of military types are preparing to engage her as a threat. Other bit players from the Marvel Cinematic Universe show up, and, in their attempts to dismantle Wanda’s enchantments, they’re also making a claim about what kind of story she belongs to — one full of gadgets, weapons, and standoffs.

Read the whole thing at Mere Orthodoxy

Game Design with Questing Beast

My husband Alexi and I were guests on Questing Beast for a discussion of game design and storytelling. I really enjoyed the conversation, particularly when we talked about how social conflict in incorporated into a game’s mechanics.

A more freeform game can turn on the player’s quick-thinking, rather than the character’s. We talked a bit about what kinds of design give you freedom to improvise while still giving structure to the story.

You can check out Alexi’s games at Cloven Pine Games, and I’ve tried my hand at a few myself! I’ve written about Back Again from the Broken Land, the game we wrote together, for the Gauntlet and for Mere Orthodoxy.

How The Government Wasted Our Pandemic Sacrifices

In my first piece for The Week, I’m discussing why the lack of high-quality masks is our pandemic failures in miniature.

Throughout the pandemic, Americans have made extraordinary sacrifices to slow the spread of the virus. We haven’t been unequal to the disaster, but our leaders’ lapses have left people filling in the gaps of the lackluster federal and state responses. Yet with each surge comes scolding about individual choices, while first former President Donald Trump and then President Biden have minimized the centralized work only the government can do.

This sleight of hand is part of a pattern. Our leaders love to valorize individual effort, especially when it suggests policy reform is unnecessary. When a child saves up his allowance to pay back his classmates’ lunch debt, it’s not a feel good story, much less a universal way to ensure every student has enough to eat. After graduating into a recession, millennials can’t catch up by avoiding avocado toast and lattes. The environment won’t be saved by banning plastic straws, rather than seriously considering nuclear power.

In each case, these stories shift the blame to individuals — if they really cared about getting out of debt or cleaning up the environment, shouldn’t they be visibly suffering in pursuit of the goal? If not, what right do they have to demand that anyone else take action?

Read the whole thing at The Week

The Case for Unconditional Child Allowance

I defend the Romney child allowance plan against criticism from Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee in The New York Times.

The senators called the Romney proposal “welfare assistance” and added: “An essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work. Congress should expand the Child Tax Credit without undercutting the responsibility of parents to work to provide for their families.”

But the senators are pro-work only in a narrow sense, and in that sense they sell families short. There is no intrinsic value to labor outside the home that raises it to a higher dignity than the work of parents or other caregivers within the home. If only wage work is seen as “real” work, then a father who stays home with his young children doesn’t count as providing for his family.

To convert care into “real” work, he has to perform a sleight of hand. If the father swaps kids with a neighbor and each family pays the other to take care of its kids, then the same diaper changes, food preparation and reading of storybooks become official work. It’s hard to call this shell game pro-family policy, in which child care has value only if you don’t provide it to your own child.

Read the whole thing in The New York Times

And you may want to sign up for Other Feminisms, my substack community focused on the dignity of interdependence.

A Game About Grace and Weakness

During Zinequest 2021, I wrote a piece at Mere Orthodoxy about the design choices and theology behind Back Again from the Broken Land, a game I wrote together with my husband. The game is Tolkien-inspired—it’s about small adventures walking home from a big war.

Part of our goal was making it Tolkien-like in the action of grace, not just the physical setting. I wrote a little about how this shaped the character design for the Turncoat archetype in particular.

Like Cain, the Turncoat finds that their presence proclaims the fact of their betrayal. Whatever they do to make amends happens in the shadow of the evil they’ve done. But Back Again from the Broken Land isn’t a story of despair. My aim was to take sin seriously, in order to be able to treat grace with gravity.

Thus, the Turncoat’s options for their Gift are meant to be a salve for the ache of their guilt. Their Gear is something they can’t escape, but I wanted the Gift they received on their journey to also have this haunting quality. The Turncoat chooses from these options:

A cooling breeze you can’t leave behind

A snatch of song you can’t forget

A draught that you can’t drink dry

I wanted to write gifts that might feel unwelcome to someone who feels unworthy. I imagined a Turncoat who would throw away or abandon any material gift, just as we can choose to isolate ourselves and turn away help when we feel mired in our sins. Thus, each Gift is meant to suggest the Hound of Heaven.

Read the whole thing at Mere Orthodoxy

Snow Days and Slack

The covidtide winter was already hard, and then schools started doing away with snow days in favor of digital school. I’m at Breaking Ground defending the snow day and its power to interrupt our overscheduled, strained routines.

Slack is a necessary part of life, both for the individual and for the community. In Prayer as a Political Problem, Fr. Jean Daniélou observes that prayer and silence are becoming luxury goods. He writes, “There is a speeding up of tempo which makes it more difficult to find the minimum of freedom on which a minimum life of prayer depends. . . . Shall we say that the life of prayer can be possible only for those who are able to take advantage of [the shelter of monastic life] and thus restrict it to only a small part of humanity?”

Daniélou wrote in 1967, when he saw people flee to the movie theaters as the only refuge a person might find from the “never-ending barrage of demands from outside himself.” Today, they remain one of the only spaces we can expect the requirement (and thus permission) to turn off our phones. A storm can make the same demand: a power outage, a snowed-in driveway, that requires us, and thus allows us, to say no to outside obligations.

Unlike a weekend, a snow day arrives as an unexpected windfall—a blank day in the calendar that we haven’t had time to fill up with appointments. As a child, I spent one snow day covering my bedroom ceiling with constellations of glow-in-the-dark stars. Another was spent sculpting tiny Quidditch figures, with rings pressed into the players’ backs, so I could suspend the whole team on fishing wire. A game, frozen in time, in the space given to me by the frost outside.

Read the whole thing at Breaking Ground

Writing Back Again from the Broken Land

My husband Alexi and I have written our first game together! Back Again from the Broken Land is a Tolkien-inspired role-playing game about small adventures walking home from a big war. We launched the game on Kickstarter as part of ZineQuest.

In the game, you and the other members of your fellowship are making your way home, avoiding the Doomslord’s remaining Hunters, and reckoning with the Burdens you picked up along your Journey.

I wrote a post for the Gauntlet blog about some of my design choices for the game, including how you give depth to the people and places the characters encounter by making choices about their Wounds.

Back Again from the Broken Land interprets NPC pretty generously—as befits a land marked by magic. Our system of Wounds is meant to cover anyone from an innkeeper to a town to a river. You might run into a young man with the Wound, “struggling to fill his mother’s place for younger siblings” or the dirt of a battlefield with the Wound, “the earth misses the mud that was mixed with battle’s blood and cannot meld back into the whole.”

Like a Drive, a Wound is meant to flesh out an NPC by giving them something that they’re actively struggling with. An NPC’s appearance may be brief, or their Wound may lead the fellowship to delay their journey home, using the Gaze into the Distance move to ask, “How could I make peace here?”

Littleness is a major theme of Back Again from the Broken Land, and Wounds are part of how we hope to make the bigness of the world believable. It also colors the advice I give to GMs and players about responding to the Wounds of the people they meet:

“The PCs will not and cannot heal every Wound they encounter. They are small people and strangers in these lands. It may be enough to bear witness or lay an additional stone on a cairn. The unresolved Wound may become a named Burden. But sometimes, they can put something right, and there is a glimpse of hope. The companions can help begin a mending, but all Wounds will take sustained care to fully heal.”

You can read the whole thing here.

In Defense of Boring Time with Friends

I was honored to be a guest writing for Gracy Olmstead’s Granola newsletter, and I wrote a defense of storge—the love marked by affection and fondness.

Inviting people into the quotidian parts of your day isn’t just, as I used to think of it, a way of staving off boredom or loneliness. It’s a pledge of affection. In the Greek typology of loves, it’s an expression of storge, which tends to be translated as “affection,” though I’ll confess I usually gloss it as “fondness.” In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis writes:

“Affection has a very homely face. So have many of those for whom we feel it. It is no proof of our refinement or perceptiveness that we love them; nor that they love us. What I have called Appreciative Love is no basic element in Affection. It usually needs absence or bereavement to set us praising those to whom only Affection binds us. We take them for granted; and this taking for granted, which is an outrage in erotic love, is here right and proper to a point. It fits the comfortable, quiet nature of the feeling.”

Storge sometimes feels like the most counter-cultural of the four loves, because of its smallness. An errand friendship cuts against the culture of striving and hustling that asks us to account for the usefulness of every moment of our time. Instead, it depends on leisure, on being able and willing to waste time. 

When a friend goes with you to pick up your library books, or to drop off your mail, you aren’t stepping into the role of hostess or entertainer. You simply are, and so is your friend, and it’s enough to enjoy each other’s company without working to prove your worth to each other.

Read the whole thing at Granola.

I expanded on the thought a little for my substack, Other Feminisms, focusing on how this kind of work typically falls to women.

I feel a little bad treating it as boring, since there is a kind of romance in beating the bounds of your life, keeping everything in order. Part of Jordan Peterson’s appeal comes from describing work like making your bed as fighting the Dragon of Chaos. He translates quiet, faithful work into martial metaphors. In truth, it’s much more like digging latrines than charging into the mines of No-Man’s-Land.

The Wasted Potential of Wonder Woman 1984

I was a fan of most of the first Wonder Woman film, but sadly disappointed by Wonder Woman 1984. At First Things, I wrote a little on how the film failed to live up to its promise.

In her second film, the recent Wonder Woman 1984, Diana isn’t facing down an enemy power, but a distinctly American moral threat. Her antagonists are relatively ordinary people: a shy scientist (Barbara Minerva, played by Kristin Wiig) and a floundering con man (Maxwell Lord, played by Pedro Pascal). Both covet the kind of mastery displayed by Diana, but they pursue the outward signs of strength while neglecting the inward discipline required to wield them.

Lord is a crook who’s even snookered himself. In his infomercials, he invites investment in his oil business with his personal mantra, “Life is good! But it can be better.” His oil fields may be secretly dry, but he still believes his own tag line, “All you need is to want it.” He has no exit planned from his Ponzi scheme because he doesn’t think of himself as a fraudster, just as a winner whose time hasn’t come yet.  

Read the whole thing at First Things.