"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
Losing My Child at Easter
My husband and I lost our first child at 6 weeks at Easter in 2017. I wrote this essay to thank the women who cared for me in extraordinary ways while we grieved. "One week after we lost our baby, the Gospel reading was the story of the apostle Thomas poking his finger into the… Read More
Daniel Tammet on wordplay, poetry, and language-learning
When I read Thinking in Numbers, the first book I encountered by Daniel Tammet, I ordered a copy for myself before I was halfway done with the library copy. I loved the way he wrote about math. And, in his new book, Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing, I love the way he writes… Read More
Farewell to the small graces of Great Comet
"Natasha and Pierre’s marriage is hundreds of pages away (and Andrey will reconcile with Natasha and die before that comes to pass). The change in Natasha is simply this, as she describes it, “For the first time in many days, I weep tears of gratitude, tears of tenderness, tears of thanks.” Nothing has been solved… Read More