I joined Julia Yost on the First Things podcast to talk about my article "How Vulgarity Normalizes Predators" and how abusers like Weinstein have an easier time hiding their abuse in plain sight when we accept moderate sexual harassment as just the way things are. You can listen to the full episode here. I'm the… Read More
Author: Leah Libresco
Fare Forward returns, with me on New Stoicism
Fare Forward, the Christian journal of ideas, is returning to print this December with a special edition. I have a feature on New Stoicism, with particular emphasis on Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle is the Way) and Massimo Pigliucci (How to be a Stoic) The magazine will also include: Matthew Loftus and Brandon McGinley (author of The… Read More
Wizards and the Wounds of the World at Doxacon
I had the pleasure of being the keynote speaker at Doxacon (a scifi/fantasy + theology conference). I got to speak about the different kinds of magic on display in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series and Lev Grossman's The Magicians trilogy. And I managed to find an excuse to bring up Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft, too.Diane Duane's Young… Read More
How Vulgarity Normalizes Predators
"In the office, vulgarity similarly functions as near-harassment, even when a raunchy joke is genuinely appreciated by its hearers. Every moment of crudity normalizes sex-as-assault, if only at the level of making someone else uncomfortable. C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, distinguishes between raunchiness as a sin against chastity (when it is “in order to excite… Read More
Debating Virtue, Inculcating Virtue
In David Brooks's op-ed today, praising Alan Jacobs's How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, he cites what I'm pretty sure is Jacobs citing me! Brooks discusses C.S. Lewis's essay on the Inner Ring, and how the desire to belong to a group can warp our character as we compromise to be… Read More
Discussing my Miscarriage on Morning Glory
Gloria Purvis and the Morning Glory team at EWTN had me on as a guest to talk about my miscarriage and the tremendous grace I received through other mothers who had lost their children. These mothers were Christ to me, offering me their own wounds to me as gifts, living out His transfiguration. I come… Read More
The Limits of ‘Common Sense’ Gun Control
I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, drawing on my experience at FiveThirtyEight researching gun deaths in America. By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want… Read More
Trappist monks discuss my book
I was pleased and surprised to find that a group of Trappist monks at New Melleray Abbey have been discussing my book, Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer. One of the monks described their impressions: This evening several of us gathered to watch a segment of The Gist in which Leah Libresco talks… Read More
Absent Absolution (a triptych)
I was struck recently by a similarity between three articles on three different topics: the experiences of people who accidentally kill someone, problems with the disease model of addiction, a soldier who tried to contact the family of a civilian he killed in Iraq. Each of the articles is worth reading in full, but I've… Read More
Lewis Hyde on Usury
I love Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art, so I recently checked to see if he wrote other books, and, thus, read his The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. One chapter is focused on usury. Hyde explains that the first Christian pawnshops were allowed on the condition that charging interest was… Read More