Leah Libresco's Blog

It was my pleasure to review Brian Potter’s The Origins of Efficiency for American Compass’s Commonplace.

One of the most moving victories of re-engineering that Potter describes is the production of penicillin on an industrial scale. The mold first discovered by Alexander Fleming was finicky, and the lifesaving antibiotic it produced was hard to isolate. As Potter recounts, it took a year to produce enough penicillin for the first human trial of the drug—a single policeman sick with a staph infection. The doctors had enough to give him a miraculous yet temporary recovery, but not enough to fully quash the infection. Desperate, they purified penicillin he excreted in urine and gave it to him again so that not a drop was wasted. Yet it wasn’t enough and the policeman died.

Repeated refinements gave us the present day’s abundance. The bacteria grew better thanks to an improved medium, but still only on the surface of the liquid. To get past this bottleneck, scientists scoured any mold they could find for a strain that produced penicillin while suspended—allowing the drug to scale in three dimensions. As Potter summarizes, the United States went from not having enough antibiotics for a single man in 1941 to producing enough for the entire Allied Armed Forces in 1943.

When a product is completely new, like penicillin, there aren’t entrenched interests who want to protect the old way of doing things. Speeding up penicillin production was pure gain, with no jobs lost and many created. But, as Potter’s examples show, the line between streamlining an old product and inventing a new one is blurry. Making a product efficiently often requires making it into something new.

Read the rest at Commonplace

Charlotte’s Bishop is shunting all the Traditional Latin Mass communities to a single site, specifically chosen because it can only hold about a quarter of those who currently seek out the Extraordinary Form. I have a paywalled op-ed for The Pillar (they’re worth it!) with a prayer for what could happen next.

If he wants to reform the TLM community in Charlotte, I wish that Bishop Martin would offer the TLM once a month in the new chapel. I wish he would linger with the community at coffee hour (currently prohibited at the chapel). I wish he would commit to making his case that he is restricting the form out of pastoral love for people he knew by name. If the TLM is a source of division in the diocese, couldn’t the bishop be the one to cross over to the margins?

In his letter to the Charlotte diocese, Bishop Martin said: “God has been at work in your lives through this particular celebration… I have listened to your stories of faithfulness and the ways the TLM has enriched your spiritual journeys.”

But despite these words, it’s plain that his people do not feel like they have received pastoral care.

The bishop knows that his people have sought out this Mass, but can he articulate why in a way they would recognize? In other words, can he pass an Ideological Turing Test? If not, how can he live up to the injunction that the shepherd should smell of the sheep?

My children go to a thriving Catholic school that only exists because our parish priest and local principal put aside their pride to ask why local families weren’t sending their kids. I tell the story of what happened next, and what I wish would happen in North Carolina.

Read the whole thing at The Pillar

Daniel K. Williams is a can’t miss historian for me. I was delighted to get an early copy of his Abortion and America’s Churches, a history of how denominations chose sides around Roe v. Wade. I drew on one thread of his history for an essay for Word on Fire.

In Williams’s telling, in the wake of World War II, there was a desire in many philosophical and religious traditions to be able to speak about human dignity without relying on reference to God. Religious language limited who would listen. In the wake of the Holocaust, there was an urgent need to find a minimum ground of human dignity that many diverse nations could assent to. What was objective and unambiguous about human beings?

For some thinkers, a way of grounding human value was pointing to other human beings who valued a particular person at risk. If someone was loved, whether by their mother, their child, their students, their neighbor, it required no reference to God to argue that when they were the target of violence, the harm rippled outward. This humanist view put more emphasis on the way we belong to each other, but it also made human dignity contingent on, as Williams puts it, the “rationality and the socialization process.”

Read the rest at Word on Fire

I was pleased to get to respond to Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Age of Diagnosis for Fairer Disputations. She wrote a compassionate, curious book on a highly charged issue:

O’Sullivan isn’t against inclusion tout court, but she’s very attentive to who gains and who loses. When a diagnosis expands, people with milder versions of the disorder can quickly become the vast majority of patients nested under this definition. People who consider themselves “on the spectrum” vastly outnumber people with nonverbal autism. When the definition of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome was broadened to include people without a known genetic variant, the new population of patients quickly made up eighty to ninety percent of all cases. O’Sullivan is attentive to cases where the prevalence of the disorder (as originally described) is not increasing, but more and more people with mild or variant versions are identifying with the diagnosis.

A growing community of people clustered around a disorder has some real benefits. The more people there are, the more advocates to lobby for research or to raise awareness of accommodations or to offer solidarity to each other. But if the needs of the people described by the original diagnosis are different than the people who now make up the vast majority of people under the new umbrella, the people with the most severe needs may be crowded out of the conversation.

Read the rest at Fairer Disputations

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