Leah Libresco's Blog, page 7

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.

Books I Plan to Read in 2021

Last year, I had a baby… and finished all the books on my 2020 list! (With the caveat that my husband and I took up Cardinal Sarah’s The Day is Now Far Spent as our shared Sunday readaloud book, so I get a pass since we’re reading it slowly together).

All in all, I read 119 books (36.5k pages)—which doesn’t count readings of e.g. Guess How Much I Love You (which is really two books, since we’re on our second copy after the baby gnawed holes in the first).

The oldest books I read were St. John Chrysostom’s On Wealth and Poverty, Dostoyevsky’s Demons, Jane Eyre, Mansfield Park, and My Antonia.

As for this year, the eleven books I’m prioritizing are:

The Friendship of Christ by Robert Hugh Benson On the Prayer of Jesus by Ignatius Brianchaninov Fake Heritage: Why We Rebuild Monuments by John Darlington Shapeshifters: A Journey Through the Changing Human Body by Gavin Francis Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy by Katherine Ludwig Jansen Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It by Julia Keller Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind by Grace Olmstead The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel Gunpowder & Glory: The Explosive Life of Frank Brock OBE by Harry Smee and Henry Macrory Perfectly Human: Nine Months with Cerian by Sarah C. Williams

My Favorite Books of 2020

These are my favorite books I read in 2020, listed in roughly chronological order. Nearly all of them were read as ebooks, many as library books, as I (initially) read with a sleeping newborn on my lap and (later) read standing up, ready to run to pluck our adventurous baby off the stairs.

I rely on Library Extension to remind me what’s in my local card catalog and then, not infrequently, scribble down page numbers to transfer dog-ears to the copy of the book I’ve ordered to keep.

And, of course, I do recommend my own books: Arriving at Amen, the story of my conversion of intellect, which was followed by a conversion of the heart and habits. And Building the Benedict Option, my handbook for building thicker Christian community over the next two weeks to two months (no waiting for some future ideal!).

Finally, I’ve started a substack, Tiny Book Club, which functions as, well, a tiny book club. Every month, I host a discussion of an excellent article or essay, and we all get to sit with it for a sustained conversation. Plus, I invite in a guest I admire to join us.

Now, on to the books!

Listening for America: Inside the Great American Songbook from Gershwin to Sondheim by Rob Kapilow

A very delightful Christmas present, read a chapter at a time throughout the year. As I wrote in my review for Fare Forward:

Reading Kapilow took me one step further into appreciation. He has a gift for worked examples and teaches by rewriting the songs he’s showcasing. He changes just one small detail at a time to show how it supports the song. He might remove a bluesy swing, a shift up the octave, a chromatic note, to come up with a more pedestrian variant he calls the “Kapilow version.” None of his rewrites have a wrong note, but they lack inventiveness.

Playing his rewrites side by side with the originals, you can hear how the expected version might sound good enough, but the real version is sublime.

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

I picked up this book for exactly the reason you expect, and read it as we watched the copper tape we’d put on our doorknobs slowly verdigrise—a preparation for the wrong kind of pandemic. Solnit’s stories of solidarity and compassion helped guide our family as we built a mutual aid listserv for our block (and joined the larger one for our whole town).

I relied on her examples when writing for Comment on “Locating Our Invisible Wounds” and how we can sustain the solidarity of emergencies in more ordinary times.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake



The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson

These were the two books I was most stymied in persuading other people to let me give them as gifts. Not even when I mentioned that Merlin Sheldrake (that name!) grew mushrooms on his own copy of his book and then ate them, or when I discussed how no one has actually seen the part of the ocean where eels mate (we just have a rough guess by mapping progressively smaller eels) did a certain member of my family agree to let me give her either for her birthday.

Both books were delightful and standouts in the genre that my husband has identified as my favorite: “biographies of things that aren’t people.”

Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World by Alexander Rose

Another entry in that genre, and a good reminder of how what is “inevitable” in retrospect is fairly unpredictable in the moment. When planes and airships were being developed, it was airships that had the obvious advantage and airplanes that seemed like a folly. It took leaps in engine technology for airplanes to become remotely plausible as a commercial endeavor. It makes you wonder what reversals are lurking a dozen years down the line for us.

It’s also a fascinating paired portrait of Count von Zeppelin and Juan Trippe, two men with an unshakable confidence in the world they could imagine and real logistical competence to bring to bear on their vision. In some ways, this was pandemic reading too—a sharp contrast with the US’s unambitious public health response.

Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion by Abigail Rine Favale

Favale’s memoir is sharply observed and thoughtful. She was one of the inspirations for the Other Feminisms substack community I started this year—focused on fostering a culture of interdependence, not autonomy. I became interested in Favale after reading her essays at Church Life Journal, so I’ll offer a link and a quote.

The traditional feminist solution to the “problem” of female biology is unfettered access to contraception and abortion: this reveals an ironically masculine bias. Rather than seeking to change social structures to accommodate the realities of female biology, the feminist movement, since its second wave, has continually and firmly fought instead for women to alter their biology, often through violence, so that it functions more like a man’s. Tellingly, the legal right for a woman to kill a child in her womb was won before the legal right for a woman not to be fired for being pregnant. The message is clear: women must become like men to be free.

The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown by Karen Olsson

A thoughtful meditation on both Weils, Simone and André, the latter part of the Bourbaki collective in mathematics. Olsson really lives out the ideal of wrestling with the thinkers of the past that you’ll hear more about in two more recommendations. Simone Weil is alive with moral urgency and desperately seeking some kind of martyrdom—she wants to be utterly consumed by doing right. André finds a safer and more acceptable way to be swallowed up by truth.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

A clear, thoroughly-cited explanation of how racial housing discrimination is part of our recent past and has serious consequences for the present. It is a persuasive case for reparations.

Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs



Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz

Two books that both came out this year and seemed to be in dialogue. My husband reviewed Breaking Bread for Fare Forward:

For those of us already sold on dead authors, Jacobs has a different caution: not to idealize the past or reshape it in our own image, but allow ourselves to encounter it in its strangeness. […] Jacobs’s preferred metaphor is a wrestling match—specifically the biblical Jacob’s tussle with God and his subsequent demand that God bless him: “I will not let you go until you bless me” (Gen. 32:26). From this passage Jacobs concludes that struggle and demand are not incompatible with reverence. The classics, then, can be our sparring partners.

The image of wrestling with a text in order to receive a blessing has really stuck with me. Meanwhile, Hitz’s book is focused on praising the impracticality of the intellectual life. She rejects pitches for the humanities that turn on how much more employable it makes you. The best encounters are sought with no ulterior motive. (I don’t think I agree with this.) Both Hitz and Jacobs are notably good-faith interlocutors.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

There are books I read this year that left me short-tempered while reading. A too-aggressively paced thriller, a dystopia that seemed more the fault of the author’s spleen than a living world. I put them down and wanted to shake myself and shake them off like a dog does after a bath.

Piranesi was the opposite. It’s the book that I found most restful to read, even as I was in suspense about the plot, and the book where I most felt like I was gentler while reading it.

It’s as rich a world as Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but, as Joy Clarkson says in her review for Plough, “Where Jonathan Strange might be compared to an imperious baroque mansion, Piranesi is an intricately painted miniature.” Trust me on this one.

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

This novel combines tight plotting, and fantastic worldbuilding. The premise is that travel to parallel worlds is possible, but only if you are already dead in the world you’re travelling to and your slot is open. That makes the most valuable people the ones who were treated as discardable and have died almost everywhere. Every choice made by Johnson is well considered, and she gives the peripheral characters enough life for you to believe they are always active, even when not in the narrative spotlight.

Raising a Rare Girl by Heather Lanier

Lanier’s first child, Fiona, was born missing part of a chromosome, and Lanier’s memoir is a meditation on disability and dignity. It was tough reading for me, especially because so often doctors and social workers treat Lanier as a bad mom (prior to the diagnosis) and, once the underlying cause of Fiona’s issues is known, they shift to treating Fiona as discardable. “It’s either bad seed or bad soil,” one doctor tells Lanier while she’s still recovering from birth.

Lanier’s book is a rebuttal to both claims, and one that avoids defending her daughter by telling a story of triumph over disability and difference. Fiona overcomes some challenges but some things are truly out of reach for her. She doesn’t earn her worth as she expands what she can do—she is of infinite worth, just like Lanier, just like you, simply because she is. The doctors who dismiss her miss the chance to see her and know her as Fiona. The reader does not.

I would link to last year’s list, but it looks like I may not have compiled one since 2017, so here’s the link to all the way back then.

All Aboard the Generation Ship!

Nearly a year into the pandemic, I wrote an essay for Breaking Ground on how we can persist in hope by drawing on sci-fi stories of generation ships.

A generation ship spans the wide gap of time between planets. No one aboard at the beginning of the journey expects to see the destination. They commit to the ship in order that their children, or their children’s children’s children will see and reach the promised end.

Delivering on the promises of a generation ship requires committing to specific practices of stewardship. And whether you’re safeguarding a ship or a community, the core practices remain the same.

I discuss a few lessons from these stories and how we can adapt them to our non-spacefairing time. Including:

Weave Essential Knowledge into All Parts of Life

The same is true in our own lives. Whatever is most important should be before our eyes and knit into our bones. If you can’t see the people you love, hang up their pictures in your house, and schedule a monthly phone call. If it isn’t safe to gather for worship, make your home a place of contemplation, hanging up religious art. You may already begin meals with thanksgiving, but where else should your daily routine include an invitation to be with God?

Look over your usual days and ask, What instruction have I laid out for myself? Do I want to become the person I’m implicitly teaching myself to be? Revise accordingly.

Read the whole thing at Breaking Ground

Discussing Illiberal Feminism with Plough

I joined Susannah Black and Jennifer Frey for a discussion of Illiberal Feminism, hosted by Plough.

The conversation was sparked, in part, by my article “Dependence,” in Plough. Here’s an excerpt from that piece:

It always confuses me that illiberalism is taken as a belligerent ideology – both by its detractors and some of its proponents – as though it were rooted in strength and prepared to wield that power against others. It is con­temporary liberalism that begins from an anthropology of independence, and presumes a strength and self-ownership we do not in fact possess.

The best corrective the growing illiberal enthusiasm can offer is not a rival strength – no fist clenched around a flagpole of any standard. Instead it must offer a re-appreciation of weakness – the kind I see in the chubby, fumbling fingers of my daughter, reaching out to her parents.