Leah Libresco's Blog

The divorce rate is declining, but for the worst reasons. Fewer and fewer people are getting married. I explain the problem for the Institute for Family Studies.

The decline in marriage has also not been uniform. Wealthier and better-educated singles are more likely to get married than those who are poorer and less educated. Marriage rates also have a significant racial gap. This means the declining divorce rate is much more a compositional effect, driven by who isn’t getting married than it is a victory for marriage preparation and promotion. 

Pro-marriage conservatives aren’t out to improve the divorce rate at any cost, but to prepare more people to desire the graces of marriage and be prepared to make and keep the vows that marriage entails. It would be a hollow victory to teach the Success Sequence, for example, if it simply convinced more people that marriage was out of reach. The goal should not be to dissuade marginal marriages but to prepare men and women to make strong marriages. 

Read the whole thing at IFS

At The Dispatch, I’m making a case against customized wedding vows. Promising marriage is entering an pre-existing institution, not an act of expressive individualism.

Classically, the marriage vows are not about the particular couple standing at the altar—they’re about the institution the couple is choosing to enter. Classical vows (for better, for worse, etc) have lasted with only minor revisions for a thousand years. They are intended to suit every couple, uncustomized, and they enumerate the promises that must be kept for a marriage to be a marriage. But customized vows frequently mingle serious promises with ones that cannot or should not be kept.  

It’s not necessary in marriage to “always laugh at your jokes,” it’s not necessarily possible to “never go to bed angry,” and it’s actively counterproductive to “pretend not to notice” a particular flaw. For the newlyweds, it’s easy for customized vows to be more backward-looking—telling the story of their relationship so far—rather than looking ahead to the sickness and health, better and worse that awaits them.  

Read the rest at The Dispatch

I’ve got an appreciation of Andor that goes hard on greebles (the small, irregular pieces of plastic that give Star Wars ships their detailed texture).

It’s the greebles that gave the Empire’s ships their sense of enormity, even though they were really miniatures. A smooth-textured ship has trouble communicating its scale, especially against a field of distant stars. The greebles, stuck on all over, create a sense of expansiveness and activity. A few greebles may have a clear function in the plot (this protuberance is an anti-aircraft gun, that dimple a shield generator), but the overall effect is one of possibility. The ship (and the world) has riches that our story will not plumb.

For Gilroy, it’s the trust that every individual is infinitely interesting that both allows an actor to do his job and guarantees that the Empire cannot prevail. The Empire is less fascinated by the stubborn set of Dedra Meero’s jaw than is actress Denise Gough, who plays the Imperial Security Bureau agent on the rise. The Empire sees Syril Karn’s faith in regularity and order as a currency to spend, but only actor Kyle Soller understands the depth of Karn’s love of fair play.

The Empire asks its people to be less than they are, to sand off their greebles and become featureless and frictionless. In so doing, it makes every eruption of individuality an act of
destabilizing rebellion.

Read the rest at First Things

It was my pleasure to write about Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati’s second miracle for Word on Fire. His canonization hinges on the healing of a seminarian’s Achilles tendon tear—not the kind of injury that seems to call for a miracle.

Some ailments—a terminal cancer, a limb slated for amputation—offer no worldly source of hope. The sufferer requires either the grace of an improbable healing or the grace of knowing his or her pain is united with Christ’s. Gutierrez’s injury didn’t require a miracle—he had a clear, if arduous, path to recovery.

I find the miracle so moving because it is a sign of God’s (and Pier Giorgio’s) tenderness in small things. It is easy to divide our lives into two domains: the parts of our life we need God’s help for, and the bits that can (and maybe should) pass under his notice. Gutierrez’s miracle is an encouragement to lift every part of our day to God, not just the parts that obviously need his help. We don’t have to triage our needs and save only the big ones for God. 

God’s grace is not rationed. You can ask for help in the small things without wearing out his patience with your most urgent needs. A habit of turning over the smallest and simplest parts of your life helps foster a lively conviviality in your prayer. If the day is a continuous conversation with God, it (hopefully) is more natural to ask for help with a persistent sin that makes you ashamed than if you were approaching God after a long silence with that heaviness on your heart. 

Read the whole thing

I changed my mind about euthanasia in June 2015. The world has been rushing in the other direction. For The Dispatch I explain why MAiD makes an idol of autonomy and endangers our sense of what it means to be human.

Moving past the desire for “death with dignity” requires admitting that autonomy is not the ordering principle of a human life. Every person begins their life as a burden to someone else. It isn’t pejorative to say so—a baby simply must be carried, first by just one woman, in utero, and then after birth as a shared burden among more bearers. 

Most of us (though not all of us) grow out of this severe, stark dependence, but our trajectory is an orbit, not an escape. For those with pronounced disabilities, chronic illness, or a severe accident, the orbit is tightly constrained. For others, the loops are a little more sprawling until illness, injury, or (for many women) childbearing, turns us inward to the space where our lives are more obviously defined by our weakness and need. But for almost all of us, dying is a return to our origin—a time of profound need, copious bodily effluvia, and reliance on another’s strength.

We are heavier in our old age, requiring more helpers to carry and clean us, but also freighted with shame. The need of a baby is seen as a natural feature of his or her age, but the needs of an elderly person are not seen by our culture as natural to them in the same way. A baby is not aware they will one day do more; an elderly person feels the lack of what they once could do. But a baby does not abhor her body. A baby would not desire to die rather than be suckled. 

Read the rest here…

Pictured above are three of my big projects of 2024. I read The Power Broker over my maternity leave, I read Sr. Prudence Allen in the waning months of the year, and my baby I grew all year (in and ex utero). Not pictured, but also gestating last year is my own book The Dignity of Dependence, which will be out this fall.

I read 9/10 of my “to read” books for 2024. (One snuck in under the wire, finished the first week of January). Overall, I read 82 books / 26 thousand words. And I like to check how much out of the present I’m reading. Per Goodreads, my oldest reads were published in 1897 (Charlotte Mason’s Parents and Children), 1947 (The Dry Wood, by Caryll Houselander), and 1954 (Ellul’s The Technological Society). I’m going to notch something much older if I get through my planned 2025 reading!

I like to make this list as a way to choose what to prioritize in the coming year. I rarely read every book I choose to list, but I read many more than I would if I didn’t have them awaiting checkmarks. Technically, when I make this list, I am secretly choosing what I am prioritizing in the week between Christmas and New Years, when I tend to knock out one or two final books in a slightly rushed way. Ah well.

So, in alphabetical order, here’s what I hope to read this year:

The Shield of Achilles by W.H. Auden (Alan Jacobs’s critical edition) Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire In Necessity and Sorrow by Magda Denes The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory, 1793-1815 by Roger Knight Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott The Walls Around Us by David Owen The Liturgy of Death by Alexander Schmemann Essays on Women by St. Edith Stein Anabasis by Xenophon Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers by Alexander Zvonkin

A year very full of babies and book writing! I’m making a lot less progress through my planned reading than I hoped, but I think this might be the longest list of “favorite” reads to date. So not too bad a year. And my oldest is reading BOB books on her own, so one day soon she’ll have her own list of favorite (solo) reads.

As always, I’m listing books in chronological order to avoid picking favorites (with one exception + some thematic grouping). So, with no more ado, here are my favorite books I read (for the first time) in 2024:

THE POWER BROKER

by Robert Caro

I started reading The Power Broker at the hospital the night before my son was born. I finished just before I returned to work. Apologies to him if this means he grows up weird(er). I wrote a reflection on the book for Word on Fire.

It’s just a wonderful epic of New York, which moves easily across the years and back and forth between the scale of sprawling highways and the personal tragedies of New Yorkers (including Moses!). I took about a month of on and off reading long excerpts to my husband.

The Good Virus

by Tom Ireland

Sometimes a book comes along at just the right time. I read this history of using bacteriophage viruses to defeat bacteria while… pregnant and recovering from a staph infection. “I wish I could go to Georgia [country] and just get injected full of weird viruses so I could get better,” I said feverishly to my husband.

I’m not saying you should do that, but some people with massively antibiotic resistant infection have and found healing. Phage therapy is fascinating and weird because you are setting two ambiguously alive things at war in your body. While drug development is about standardization, phage therapy is a matter of selectively breeding an antagonist to your disease.

The Country of the Blind

by Andrew Leland

A memoir of preparing to become completely blind due to degenerative illness. It wound up getting cited in my forthcoming The Dignity of Dependence (coming in the fall!) due to Leland’s fascinating discussion of ideological splits between using a guide dog or a cane. Does depending on a living being versus using a tool make someone more disabled (pejorative) in the judgement of the surrounding culture?

Motherhood on Ice

by Marcia C. Inhorn 

An ethnography of egg freezing! Well reported and more interested in truth seeking than in laying up ammunition for the culture war. One of those books you borrow from the library and order your own copy midway through chapter two. I drew on this book for my Lamp feature on infertility, IVF, and fairy tale bargains.

The Fund

by Rob Copeland

Ok, this book made my list because I’ve had a number of friends work at Bridgewater (the hedge fund profiled in this book) and I had a schadenfreudic experience reading. Here’s how I always described Bridgewater to others:

You know all those things that annoy you about office culture? The little lies everyone understands you have to tell? Bridgewater decided they weren’t going to have any of those normal problems and invented much more exotic problems.

Technically, I’d like to see more experiments with office culture, but Bridgewater devolved into lengthy, Maoist self-criticism sessions (taped and played for new recruits!) plus a side of sexual harassment.

(My other “I loved this more than you might” favorite read is Do I Know You? by Sadie Dingfelder. I just have no idea how this reads if you don’t, like me and the author, have prosopagnosia.)

Metaphysical Animals

by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman

A group biography of Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley. Many wonderful historical details (like the lengths Anscombe went to to get away with teaching in trousers). But best as a portrait of philosophy as a fundamentally social activity. When we ask how to live (and how we know), we wind up asking how to live alongside others. Good to have philosophical friends who will offer comment on both your papers and your life.

How Buildings Learn

by Stewart Brand

I’m only seeing this listed used, and you’re going to want it in print, not as an e-copy. Brand offers detailed drawings of how building can be designed from the start to have room to flex and grow with the needs of their occupants. The object level details are fascinating, but floating above it is a guide on how to live with humility. Apply Brand’s guidance to your own life and you have a good middle way between a shrinking false humility that shirks the responsibility to build and a controlling pride that assumes your idea for now should stand forever. Genuinely an aid to prayer for me.

Origen’s Revenge

by Brian Patrick Mitchell

I read this on the recommendation of Mrs. Psmith, and I really enjoyed it as a mapping of Hebrew, Greek, and Christian thinking on male-female complementarity. How do you get away from the idea of women as slightly defective men? Or of maleness and femaleness just being shallow skins on generic humans? Acknowledging our differences quickly feels dangerous, because we have trouble trusting others to treat us fairly if we can’t demonstrate our sameness.

The Wrong Stuff / Reentry

by John Strausbaugh / by Eric Berger

Two stories of space programs that broke all the rules, outstripped their competitors, and launched rockets more cheaply than anyone felt possible. The Wrong Stuff is the story of the Soviets. Reentry is the story of SpaceX. You will have a real easy time telling which rocket you should be willing to board.

Both have a lot of outrageous approaches to problem solving you’ll want to read aloud to someone. Both are the story of space programs where failure was not an option, because the regime/Elon would kill you. But the Soviets, although brilliant at brute forcing solutions, are ultimately playing a game of keeping up appearances—never more so than when they tell cosmonauts in descent to deal with a warning light by covering it with tape. (They all die.)

SpaceX has remained tightly focused on scaffolding rockets that could take us to Mars and beyond. They’ve managed to continue to really care about the next step in that process, even when they’d built a successful company by other metrics. Sometimes, when I get stuck, I ask myself “What would I do if it really mattered that I solve this?” and, inevitably, new ideas present themselves (some out of proportion to the problem). SpaceX runs with that mentality all the time. If you’re going to read Reentry, read Liftoff first.

The Occasional Human Sacrifice

by Carl Elliott

A series of thoughtful profiles of people who blew the whistle on unethical medical practice (and blew up their lives in the process). The author (himself a whistleblower) is fascinated by the choiceless choice many of his subjects describe. Far from experiencing a moral dilemma, they saw only one path forward that they could go down and remain themselves. I was also interested in what forms of restitution, memorial, or simple apology followed exposure. (Not much!)

Lying for Money

by Dan Davies

A witty recounting of different forms of financial fraud. Fun enough on that front, but the deeper theme is that way fraud acts as a map of where we choose to/are forced to trust each other. Reminded me of A Burglar’s Guide to the City.

Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

Did you want to read a vividly detailed story of the collapse of reasoned quantification into paranoiac madness but you skipped over The Fund because you’ve never heard of Bridgewater? Spufford’s Red Plenty is a semi-fictional story of the failures of Soviet Central Planning. He draws deeply from the historical record and notes his departures at the back. You keep hoping things will take a turn for the truly fictional and swerve from the famine and pain coming.

Frostbite

by Nicola Twilley

Sort of a complement to the two preceding. Like Red Plenty it touches on the incredible chain of interlocking decisions that gets cheese from… (checks notes) massive underground refrigerated caves to my door. Like Lying for Money it’s the map of a war against creeping corrosion (fraud/rot). Really brings home how much everything you eat remains alive in some sense—it’s slowly dying not inertly resting.

The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

A very weird book and I liked it. A precocious boy goes looking for his father among a range of potential candidates is technically a plot description, but we’re a long way from Mamma Mia. Just jump in and remember, a real samurai will parry the blade.

Buried Deep

by Naomi Novik

The second fiction book on the list is Novik’s collection of short stories. (Particular favorites of mine were “Buried Deep,” “Seven,” Lord Dunsany’s Teapot,” and “Castle Coeurlieu.”) And of course, I love Spinning Silver which eventually grew out of the shorter telling here. Novik’s magic always has a shimmer of real magic. And she’s got a eucatastrophic bent that I deeply appreciate.

And if you’d like more, here’s my best of list from 2023.

I spent my summer maternity leave reading The Power Broker (and taking care of the baby!). I was glad to get to write about Caro’s masterpiece for Word on Fire.

As Moses makes himself sovereign over parks, power plants, bridges, and housing, he unmakes his ability to steward what he has seized. He becomes both figuratively and literally deaf to the world. As his hearing deteriorates, he refuses to make any acknowledgement of his infirmity, and answers imagined questions rather than slow down to hear what is being said to him. As he circles the city in the back of his chauffeured car, he is unaware of how his multiplying roads have not solved New York City’s traffic snarls. There is a stark contrast between the imaginative empathy he had for the mother at the beach and his cultivated indifference to New York’s other commuters. 

What good is the power he successfully guarded for so many years when Moses loses his ability to apply it to the world as it actually is? When Moses is finally forced out, he is in agony in retirement. He draws up plans and makes calls to politicians that are never returned. He cannot abide living with his energy turned in on itself, with his days devoid of meetings and decisions. 

Read the rest at Word on Fire

At Deseret, I’m making the case for a baby bonus as fair and flexible help for parents and children.

A “baby bonus” is an effective way to provide support to more families with fewer complications. Every family has unique needs, and flexible assistance can help parents serve the best interests of their children in their particularity. For a worker with only guaranteed unpaid FMLA leave after the birth of a child, a baby bonus can act as paid family leave. For another family, it could help defray the costs of converting a guest room for a grandmother to stay long term to help older kids adjust to a new baby. In another family’s case, a baby bonus might cover additional childcare for an older child while the mother is hospitalized to reduce the risk of a preterm delivery. The best family support allows parents to make the decisions that are best for their specific circumstances.

Read the rest at Deseret

I’m at Word on Fire making the case against AI-created devotional art.

Each of the children’s books on our “God shelf” has a human hand, heart, and intellect behind it. Each book grew out of the love the author and illustrator had for God, for beauty, and for the little readers to come. Thinking about the work of artists as subcreators and communicators of love will, I hope, offer my children an inoculation against the AI art they encounter in the future. No matter how pleasing the output looks, AI-generated art cannot be offered in love and is not the fruit of contemplation.  

Even my own art exceeds AI slop in this respect. When I tried to draw a lion for my eldest daughter, it was, without question, worse than an image she might find elsewhere. (In fact, she burst into angry tears at how bad it was.) But it was unquestionably offered out of love for her, personally. Drawing it forced me to think harder about what a lion was, and then to meditate on how very, very short I fell of God’s grandeur in making it. 

Read the rest at Word on Fire…

I’ve got a plug for my husband’s book Saintly Adventures in the piece, and I’d also like to specifically praise John Herreid, whose The Catholic Home Art Gallery celebrates living devotional artists. And the book has perforated pages so you can tear out the prints and put them right up!