Leah Libresco on LARPing and conversion<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"LARPing (Live Action Role Playing for all you non-Geeks) is basically a new form of combined gaming and storytelling (think D and D) in which you get to\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2012\/10\/leah-libresco-on-larping-and-conversion.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Leah Libresco on LARPing and conversion\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"LARPing (Live Action Role Playing for all you non-Geeks) is basically a new form of combined gaming and storytelling (think D and D) in which you get to\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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{"id":38694,"date":"2012-10-09T00:21:37","date_gmt":"2012-10-09T07:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=38694"},"modified":"2014-12-30T12:03:40","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T19:03:40","slug":"leah-libresco-on-larping-and-conversion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2012\/10\/leah-libresco-on-larping-and-conversion.html","title":{"rendered":"Leah Libresco on LARPing and conversion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

LARPing (Live Action Role Playing for all you non-Geeks) <\/a>is basically a new form of combined gaming and storytelling (think D and D) in which you get to inhabit your character\u2019s skin.\u00a0 Fundamentalists were greatly exercised about all this some years back, since stuff with magic and spells\u00a0 and stuff was regarded as pure evil (except when Tolkien and Lewis do it).\u00a0 Of course, the reality is that fantasy and science fiction, like all other forms of human imagination, can be used for good or evil.\u00a0 One thing it has led to, as Leah points out, is encounters with the holy as LARPers put themselves inside the skins of, for instance, Nightcrawler: a devout Catholic mutant from the X Men.<\/p>\n

The Catholic tradition has long gotten that we internalize the truths of the revelation best by seeing it lived out in somebody else.\u00a0 So Paul says, \u201cImitate me as I imitate Christ\u201d and tells us to make use of the \u201criches of his inheritance in the saints.\u201d\u00a0 We are baby duck and we imprint on others.\u00a0 What the cult of the saints (and great fiction) does for us is give us human beings who show us how to be human and saints who show us how to be saints).\u00a0 They aren\u2019t perfect, but then neither are we.\u00a0 So they give us doorways into Christ.<\/p>\n

All of this is deeply incarnational, which is to say, deeply Christian.\u00a0 It is the curse of our age to fear and suspect human models and insist instead on diagrams and abstractions.\u00a0 I am Christian, in no small part, because of Christians I have known.\u00a0 Far less important are abstract ideas.\u00a0 That\u2019s why sinful Christians (and I\u2019m down there with the worst) are so damaging to the Faith, while stupid ideas typically have much less impact.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"