I’ll be at the Catholic Information Center in DC on Tuesday night as part of their summer Theology on Tap series. My topic is “Making Mistakes Well in Prayer” and it’s drawn from the final chapter (“Trusting Christ As Peter Does”) of Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer. How do you find your way through a new and challenging prayer practice or an old one that’s gone stale? Learn a few habits and strategies for beginning... Read more
The answers are up for this year’s Ideological Turing Test, and graphs and charts of how well you did will be coming all week. This time around, we had a lot more participants, so I’ve appended each writer’s bio (rot13’d to avoid spoilers) after the answer(s) ze wrote. There are more repeat players on the Christian side than the non-Christian side, because I got a lot more potential responses from atheists. So go ahead and look back at the... Read more
For gay marriage supporters with a positive freedom approach to marriage: For gay marriage supporters with a negative freedom approach to marriage: For terrible people (whatever their position on gay marriage): Sorry for radio silence — I was working in FiveThirtyEight’s NY office this week, which eats up a lot of my time in a commute. Read more
I still haven’t mentioned my favorite thing that happened during the discussion I hosted on the Benedict Option. In the final half hour of the conversation, we restricted the topic a little. First, people were going to name resources that they had, which might be useful to the group. Then people would basically make wishes (“I wish I had people to pray the Liturgy of the Hours with during the work day” “I wish I had people to volunteer with”... Read more
A few weeks ago, I hosted a discussion of “the Benedict Option” (ways for Christians to build institutions/habits to do better at providing community to each other / making living the faith feel less like a lonely pursuit) and Peter Blair of Fare Forward (the magazine sponsoring the event) has written up his thoughts. The gathering’s discussion focused largely on concrete pressures on their faith that the participants face in their everyday life in D.C. Not much was said about an... Read more
Pete Socks, the Catholic Book Blogger, is running a giveaway for my book, Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer, and I’ve stopped by chez lui to answer some questions about the book and my prayer life. Here’s a preview: PETE: For those struggling with the Catholic faith what advice can you offer as a convert? LEAH LIBRESCO: It depends a little on the nature of the struggle. If you’re making your mind up about the Catholic faith, I can... Read more
In 2015, I’m reading and blogging through Ronald Knox’s collection of sermons on Christian exemplars, Captive Flames: On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes. Every Monday (kinda), I’ll be writing about the next portrait in the book, so you’re welcome to peruse them all and/or read along. In this week’s chapter of Captive Flames, Roland Knox discusses the stories of King David and St Edmund of Abingdon in parallel, as a lens on how Catholics should live as exiles in the world and how... Read more
I got to have a nice conversation with the guys behind the Theologues podcast when I was their guest on their program, and the radio episode is now up! As your teaser, one thing we wound up talking about that I hadn’t thought about before was a possible reason that Christians tend to wind up talking and thinking more about sexual sins than other kinds. The consummation of lust is concrete and easy to picture, but we’re not so good at vividly... Read more
— 1 — Hi folks! Did you want to read a novella-length article on how software development works? I thought you might! I enjoyed the heck out of Paul Ford’s “What is Code?” for Bloomberg Businessweek (and it’s one of only a couple articles I can think of that makes excellent use of being on the web–letting you play around with little snippets of example code, animations, etc). I’d say check it out and see if you wind up enjoying it!... Read more
The ever-excellent cultural critic Alyssa Rosenberg has written a great essay today titled “Want to understand what it means to be a woman? Look to robots.” The gist: I haven’t seen anyone acknowledge the obvious point that so much of pop culture is making, and has been making for more than half a decade: Robots are an excellent metaphor for contemporary womanhood. Women are expected to declare ourselves flawless, but no matter how much we claim our perfection, we’re still... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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