Leah Libresco's Blog, page 9
June 27, 2020
Vulnerability and Visibility with the ASP
The American Solidarity Party invited me to be one of the featured speakers at their 2020 convention, and I spoke on vulnerability and visibility (in a speech that was an extension of my piece, “Locating Our Invisible Wounds” at Comment).
One way I went beyond the original article was weaving in Lewis Hyde’s discussion of usury in his book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. You can see the full passage I quoted at the link above, and here’s what I made of it in the speech.
It’s that image that has stuck with me “no individual can make a private living by standing in the stream where surplus wealth flows toward need.” Hyde is talking about a world that takes the dignity of need as seriously as the law of gravity. As water flows downhill, so, too, excess wealth, by its very nature, flows towards need.
But if we look at what we’ve built, we live in a world of dams, of stagnant ponds, of dry riverbeds at what used to be a delta. That natural flow has been diverted and the people who are in need have been hidden. We’ve all been complicit in their concealment, lest the fact of their need spur us to bring the dams down.
After my talk, I took questions during a live Q&A, which you can check out below (and had more questions about Bayesian statistics than most political conventions).
June 25, 2020
Recommending Playborhood
Philanthropy Daily is collecting reading suggestions for coronatide. I was obviously tempted to suggest The Ghost Map or Microbe Hunters, both of which I love. But I decided to go with something more focused on how we can gather again.
We’re still a long way from being able to gather, but, even after a vaccine, many streets will be empty and quiet. It won’t be the virus quashing rambunctious play, but lousy urban or suburban design. Mike Lanza’s Playborhood is a handbook for making your home and your street a “third place,” somewhere that invites serendipitous encounters and unfettered exploration. He’s like a benevolent version of the witch from Hansel and Gretel, with a house studded with climbing fixtures, rather than gumdrops. Lanza’s plans will get you in trouble with your HOA, and may result in some scars and stories. But, he argues, avoiding all risks is the biggest danger of all. Use this time to start building and getting ready to take the right risks.
You can check out my recommendation, and everyone else’s, at Philanthropy Daily.
June 4, 2020
Locating Our Invisible Wounds
At Comment I wrote about how the coronavirus links us in a solidarity of suffering. But we’ll have to work to retain that solidarity with the more everyday kinds of suffering when the pandemic passes.
This piece was published in partnership with the Breaking Ground project, which asks how we can use this time of disruption do better than the pre-pandemic status quo.
It is a hard teaching to love our enemies, to overcome hatred with meekness. But, at present, we also struggle to see the face of God in our neighbour not because we are tempted to hate our neighbour, but because we have rarely glimpsed our neighbour’s face. We have sought each other out in the present moment of extremis.
In the grip of the virus, our collective suffering is unchosen, forced on us. In the days and months to come, we have a responsibility to retain the present sense of compassion, which means “to suffer with.” As stores eventually reopen, and parks fill again, we have to remember and seek out the people whose need was particularly acute in the pandemic, but for whom “normal” is still a slow-moving disaster.
Careers and Coronavirus
Yale offers a series of ongoing fireside chats, where students and recent graduates can hear other graduates’ advice about their given field. I joined in recently for a panel that wasn’t focused on any particular career path, but rather on how to approach careers during the coronavirus pandemic.
Obviously, I have no special expertise on this topic. (Few people do!). But I tried to bring a grounded perspective, focused on how—in times of disaster and in ordinary times—we can put eternal things at the center of our lives.
May 30, 2020
All the Screen’s a Stage
When the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA had to close its playhouse due to the pandemic, I audited their online classes as a reporter for The American Interest.
During a discussion of alliteration, one smaller girl, attending the class with her big sister, stumbles on Bottom’s tongue-twister of a line, “I trust to take of truest Thisbe sight.” She throws herself into the cushions of her couch in frustration and embarrassment. Wallace is undaunted, having her try again and telling everyone, “If you’re worried you’ll mispronounce a word, please go ahead and mispronounce it with gusto.”
A reader’s error can be fruitful, prompting the group to pause and ask what kind of choice a knotty passage opens for an actor. Should Bottom, an over-the-top actor, overenunciate his lines in Midsummer’s play-within-a-play? Would the rude mechanicals that make up his troupe also get tripped up by the line? Could he be cheating with a crib sheet attached to the actor playing Wall?
March 26, 2020
Discernment in Plague-Times
I wrote at First Things on Kristen Lavransdatter as a primer for living a life of Christian service and witness in a pandemic. It was intended, among other things, as a rejoinder to the idea that sheltering in place was cowardice.
Someday when our children ask us “What did you do during the coronavirus pandemic?,” it won’t seem exciting to tell them, “I moved my book club to videochat.” It’s more exciting to imagine that the sacrifices asked of us will be dramatic and romantic.
But it’s no surprise to Christians that we should value the invisible economy of grace over more worldly signs of effort and accomplishment. We are a people who believe that cloistered sisters, praying privately, have a powerful effect on the world. We are a people who believe that prayer, fasting, and humiliation are as much a part of our response to a pandemic as work on antivirals.
Each of us does the work God has prepared for us. And at present, a number of people who are used to power and dramatic, visible forms of activity are being called unexpectedly to the cloister of the home. Nearly all of us are being called to the kind of patient, steady work (caring for children, bringing groceries to the elderly) that is rarely counted in visible measures like GDP.
March 12, 2020
Children Are a Rebuke to Our Schedules
After our baby, Beatrice, was born, I wrote a piece for the Institute for Family Studies on children as natural born interruptors, including of some of our culture’s mistaken expectations about time.
We can deceive ourselves (at least for a little while) about our limits and our control—by staying up too late to finish something for work, by cancelling on a friend we know will understand, by carving out more time, whatever the cost, to stay on schedule. But a child, starting in pregnancy, cannot be negotiated with in the same way.
That’s why children and pregnancy are the canary in the coal mine of our control-obsessed culture.
January 8, 2020
Books I Plan to Read in 2020
Technically, I did pretty well on my 2019 reading list, finishing nine of the eleven books on my list. It’s just that it sounds a lot better if you didn’t see the grocery bag of books I schlepped over Christmas break when I finished three of the books on my list during the Octave.
Beyond the list, my 2019 was made up of 172 books (55k pages). I had (to the best of my recollection, three long-haul bookclubs (The Brothers Karamazov, Can You Forgive Her?, and St. John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain: Story of a Convert). And I’m trying to make it to the end of a short-haul bookclub for Jean Danielou’s Prayer as a Political Problem.
But, very happily, a lot of my 2020 reading will be The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Goodnight Moon, I Want My Hat Back, and so on, as we prepare to welcome Beatrice Immaculata in the next few weeks. So I’ve tried to cut back (as best I can) for my proposed 2020 reading list.
Let’s see how it goes…
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America (Chris Arnade) On Wealth and Poverty (St. John Chrysostom) Placemaking and the Arts: Cultivating the Christian Life (Jennifer Allen Craft) John Henry Newman (Eamon Duffy) The Weil Conjectures (Karen Olsson) The Day is Now Far Spent (Robert Cardinal Sarah) Mercy on Trial (Austin Sarat) The Devil in a Forest (Gene Wolfe)
So, now to finish the Danielou* and keep going from there!
*book club scheduled to finish a wee bit after Beatrice’s due date
December 6, 2019
Debating Illiberalism in DC
As one of my last trips before hitting the don’t-travel-while-pregnant cutoff, I went to Washington D.C. As part of the Georgetown Initiative on Catholic Thought and Social Life, I was part of a panel with Ross Douthat, Matthew Sitman, and Austen Ivereigh. We were asked to tackle “Nationalism, Post-liberalism, and Pope Francis.”
It got a bit more heated than I’d like, but the contribution I made that I’m proudest of is at 27:30 in the video below. I lay out my definition of illiberalism, and (since, being pregnant, I’m two women on the panel), I talk a little about why liberalism’s ideal of the autonomous individual will always exclude women.
And near the end (at 1h27:30) I talk about how hard it is to talk about the magnitude of sin and of mercy at the same time.
May 19, 2019
Your Roots Shall Make Ye Free
I reviewed Michael Brennan Dougherty’s epistolary memoir, My Father Left Me Ireland, for The American Interest.
Dougherty’s rage is directed at the eunuchizing modern mindset that sees us as most free when we can be stripped of all the ties we have to others. A father can leave his children, provided the financial pain is assuaged by child support or governmental subsidy. A citizen cannot have too great a love for their own nation, lest they imply any other is lesser. A believer cannot bring their beliefs to bear in the public square, where all visions of the good need to have free access to the marketplace of ideas, provided they are not normative visions of a common good.
