First up, I have been playing a little with potential (non-pink!) stickers for people who write a The Dignity of Dependence review on Goodreads or Amazon in October. I am not a graphic designer (but I am hiring one at my day job), so I’d like your votes and your notes.

The third option I considered is “Feminism is advocating for women as women, not defective men or generic persons” but I suspect it’s a little long. You can leave proposed tweaks in the comments.

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I’m delighted to finally be able to share my conversation with Dr. Matthew Loftus about his book, Resisting Therapy Culture. I appreciated you guys proposing questions, and let me repeat now the caveat I gave when I requested them.

Loftus is not against therapy or medication, but his book does take aim at therapy culture, the overspilling of therapy as totalizing ideology, ecliping the other ways we can amend our habits and relationships.

Fun fact, the main power went out a few times in Loftus’s hospital during our conversation, so there are a few interludes where he is a spooky voice in a dark room.

I’ve uploaded the transcript as a text file here. And you can grab the pure audio below.

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I’ll give a little preview from the transcript (slightly compressed) of how we close our conversation:

Leah Sargeant:
Two closing questions for you, and they are both tricky and controversial and on the theme of Other Feminisms. One good faith question I get, after writing a whole book called The Dignity of Dependence, is: You are encouraging people to see weakness, frailty, finitude as core to who they are.

And you have told very beautifully both in the book and in our conversation that story of Christ saying, Do you wish to be healed? 

So the question I often get is, even if even if they’re not technically autonomous, isn’t it better to think of yourself as a temporarily embarrassed autonomous person so that you’re always striving for more? Isn’t reading a book called The Dignity of Dependence in some way putting you in the position of someone who’s going to say no to Do you want to be healed? If you ground too much of your identity in, "I am finite, I am limited," will you miss up your opportunities for strength? How do you think about that?

Matthew Loftus:
It’s a balance and I think different people need to hear a different message on different days. I know I certainly do. there’s there’s times when you know, in my own struggles with mental illness I needed someone to just show me that tenderness and lean into my own dependence and there’s other times when I needed people to say like, Look, you are capable. You can change this and you can live in that more autonomous mode. But you have to want to and you really have to try.

Both things are true, right? That we are intimately dependent on one another and we can never escape that reality because that’s just who we are as as human beings and then at the same time there are more options than ever before, more ways than ever before to make ourselves slaves to the wrong thing. We have to be grateful for the power that we have, right? and the freedom that we have in Christ. and then out of that gratitude exercise our agency in the world in a way that blesses others.

As for the final question, I’ll preview it here but let you check out Loftus’s answer yourself:

You can hear his initial answer in the video, but here’s the thoughtful addendum he sent me by email:

Feel free to give your own answers (and your sticker notes) in the comments.

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When I’m back, I have two talks in DC. First, on October 5th, I’m speaking about religion and AI on a panel with Andy Crouch and Sara Tillinger Wolkenfeld.

Then, on October 6th, I’m on a family policy panel at the “For the Good of the Public” summit sponsored by the Center for Christianity and Public Life.

Tomorrow is the one year birthday of The Dignity of Dependence! To celebrate, I’m aiming to run a new round of Mutual Dependence Bingo in November, and I’d like to offer a special bonus for people who leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon in October.

In May, I had a special sticker/magnet design for people who got a copy for their mom (or someone else in May). This was a lot of fun, and I’ve been bringing them to book events, too.

I’d love to know:

• If there’s a (very!) brief quote from the book you’d like to see on a sticker

• If there’s something you want to nominate as a square for mutual dependence bingo

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One thing I’ve been busy with of late is running debates for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. I’ve taped three, and two are up so far. (The forthcoming one is on whether America is an oligarchy with Sohrab Ahmari and Reason magazine’s Robby Soave. I’ve included short clips from the debates so far, so you can get a sense of them.

First up is a debate on AI ethics between Dean Ball (at OpenAI) and Zac Porcu (an Eastern Orthodox theologian). The clip below focuses on whether AI could reason about ethical rules in the way it does about mathematical ones (and whether that’s how we reason about ethics).

Second is a debate between Dan McCarthy and Christopher Caldwell, both Trump supporters (at least once) on whether Trump killed Trumpism. The clip below features McCarthy making a provocative case for Trump’s incorruptibility.

I love getting to moderate debates because I see my role as an advocate for the audience. The two debaters will each steer toward what feel like their strongest points, but it’s my job to pull them both to whatever is at the heart of why they disagree. That’s what will help the listener to decide where he or she should land.

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Finally, just because it’s lovely, I wanted to share this article on the foster home community that actor Christian Bale is funding.

Children in foster care sometimes live in group homes if they haven’t found placement with a family. When they are placed with a family, they usually move to where that family already lives. Together California upends that model by having both the parents and their foster children (and up to two children those parents already have) move together into the village, where they will be joined by 11 other foster families.

One of the parents in each family will devote themselves fully to managing the household and will be compensated for that work by the nonprofit. […]

There are also two studio apartments, reserved for children about to age out of foster care and potentially facing life on their own. The studios may also be used by birth parents undergoing the first stages of reuniting with their children.

The article is a mix of cheering and infuriating, because it’s such sane, humane design… and it’s the first set up of this kind. Nothing else is as grounded in what families actually need to flourish.

I’m looking forward to follow up reporting as families move in and the community grows (and goes through growing pains).

Now remember your homework!

What’s a (very!) brief quote from The Dignity of Dependence that you’d like to see on a sticker?

What would you nominate as a square for mutual dependence bingo?

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There’s been a bit of a whirlwind in Family Policy Twitter over a rumored proposal to shift around federal money that subsidizes childcare for low-income families. The proposal (which hasn’t been leaked to me, so I haven’t read it) allegedly allows parents to count as childcare providers, so that a household with one working parent could have the other parent stay home and receive the subsidy herself as a stipend.

Even without seeing the full proposal, I can tell there are some challenges to trying to support families using this tool: you’d be increasing the number of people eligible for funding without increasing the pool of funds and it’s not obvious a program Congress established to support working parents can legally support a non-working spouse.

But there’s a core idea here that I do support: it’s hard for parents of young children to be told the government is eager to support them… in having anyone but their baby’s parents watch their baby. So, in the Daily Wire, I gave my analysis (as best I could) of the rumors of a proposal, and also highlighted a policy tool that might be a better vector for this idea:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some states experimented with an alternative to the CCDF funds called At Home Infant Care (AHIC) that, like this proposed rule, let subsidy payments go to parents, not professionals. AHIC was funded by states, since CCDF funds explicitly couldn’t be used to support parents directly. The programs were promising but ultimately lapsed. Instead of having states cover the cost, the federal government could exempt one parent in a household from CCDF’s work requirement for the first six months to a year of their baby’s life. Caring for an infant would be treated the way being enrolled in school is — an investment in the family’s future.

Encouraging states to resume pilots of AHIC-like programs with federal dollars would allow enthusiastic governors such as Spencer Cox to experiment while other states wait to see how the programs play out. Allowing parents of babies to care for them directly, as they most frequently desire, would mean the government was supporting the natural family, not forcing parents to contract out the care that matters most.

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Because the idea came out of this admin, it’s been treated as primarily culture war, not family policy. But, as Kendra Hurley points out for the Atlantic, most countries with strong public support for child care pair it with payments to parents of young children who stay home.

It’s not ‘traddiness” that leads the Nordics to pay stay at home parents of young babies. It’s partly responsiveness to parents’ desires (many parents, abroad and in America, prefer very young children are cared for by family, at home). And it’s partly simple economic practicalities.

Infants are very very expensive to include in professional child care settings. They need very low caregiver to infant ratios. The baby rooms at a center usually can’t cover the cost of the caregivers who work there, and rely on cross-subsidy by overcharging the three- and four-year-olds’ parents. As Hurley writes:

States and cities are thus likely to “hit a wall” when trying to ramp up infant care, Brian Dew, an economic researcher who recently wrote a report comparing the U.S. and Nordic child-care systems, told me. Yet one fair, cost-effective solution could provide relief both to parents and to governments seeking to provide high-quality care: Pay families to keep babies home.

That idea might at first sound odd. But almost every country with universal child care provides a version of this benefit, which allows parents to spend more time with their young children or pay, say, grandparents or neighbors to do it. In the United States, this sort of allowance could help reduce the burden on governments trying to implement universal care and give parents with babies an option that many say they want. It’s also a proposal with growing appeal among a politically diverse set of policy makers.

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Let me round out this child care triptych with an excellent post from on what it takes for the state (or individual providers) to support flexible childcare. The post discusses several examples, but I’m pulling out just one below:

However, unless part of a well-designed hybrid offering or a public model built around drop-in, making room for flexibility is often burdensome for day care structures. Despite frequently having vacant spots when children are ill or on holiday, ECE staff struggle to reliably fill them, having to make individual calls to parents in their community who might need childcare. This takes time and energy away from their central responsibilities towards children. But vacant spots mean lost revenue, a crucial concern in a time where economic pressures and falling birth rates threaten many day care structures with closure.

Alban Gamot experienced that gap himself when his son, whom he and his wife registered for ‘occasional’ day care after missing the cutoff date for full-time, was only offered one half-day slot nine months after initially signing up. Digging into the issue, he learned that about 20% of the country’s half-a-million day care spots go unused every day, while 87% of parents see their requests for drop-in denied.¹⁰ In 2019, he founded Crèche à la demande (now CALD): a digital interface linking parents in need of drop-in care to structures with available spots.

Once signed up, families get matched with the childcare structure closest to them, and/or most adapted to theirs and their children’s needs. They become part of that structure’s “bubble”, a group of families known to and trusted by them. Crèches pay a monthly subscription to be registered on the platform. Whenever a regular spot frees up – up to a month in advance when a family shares their upcoming vacation dates, or down to an hour if a child is sick or unforeseeably absent – they easily enter that information into the platform, which notifies eligible parents. The latter can then reserve the spots on a first-come-first-serve basis, at the price of a municipal daycare…

Innovations of this kind fit within a broader trend we could call “systematising the village” – or, as I conceptualised it elsewhere, institutionalising fluidity. In a similar dynamic to that of de-institutionalisation in child protection and psychiatry, the shift towards the home in eldercare, or the growing popularity of birth centres, some systems are attempting to partly re-create the conditions of family and community care whilst ensuring high safeguarding and health standards. In this case, mobile or drop-in day care seeks to mimic the low barriers to entry and logistical ease of, say, dropping your child at their aunt’s for a few hours, but within an organised context. While they do not aim to replace those foundational structures, they can offer a quality alternative for those without extensive support networks.

I’d love to hear from you about what you think of At Home Infant Care, child allowances, extended paid leave, or other programs that pay parents who chose to be home with children in their first year.

Where have you seen attempts (successful or not) at “systematising the village” or “institutionalising fluidity” in Mélina Magdelénat’s framing?

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I feel like I came to Berry late (a lot of my friends had all been reading him and recommending him to me) so it was exciting when Marce Catlett came out last year. It was the only time I was reading a Berry novel for the first time… and everyone else was, too. We invited friends over to our house for a book club.

I couldn’t ask for a better summary of the themes of The Dignity of Dependence than this from Wendell Berry (emphasis added):

And so they took their place in the local life and economy of Andy’s, and soon enough Flora’s and their children’s, home country. They came into the local life and economy that Andy’s father had done much to preserve. They were at home with their neighbors in their neighborhood.

Andy began swapping work with people, now his neighbors, he had worked with starting in his boyhood: Elton and Mary Penn, Arthur and Martin Rowanberry, Pascal and Sudie Rowanberry Sowers. They followed the only rule of membership: When any of them needed help, the others came to help. By extension of their one rule, there was no “settling up.” All help was paid for in advance by the knowledge that there would be no end to anybody’s need for help, which would be given to the limit of life and strength.

Our frailty is our entry ticket to what Berry calls the Membership.

We can build lasting community, with horizontal solidarity among peers and vertical solidarity between generations because we will never run out of our need for each other.

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I’ll be gathering people together again soon enough (two families coming over on successive days this weekend, and then we go a-visiting ourselves on Monday). Next weekend, we host people to watch Come from Away. (If you know me in real life, feel free to DM for details). I’d like to get people together for a Berry literary wake, but because we already have a very full community life, it will take a little bit to find a slot in our calendar.

In the mean time, while I’m waiting to say “Yes” to that idea, I’m saying “No” to one thing:

One other not-yet Yes for us is that we’ve marked our calendar for “Sticker’s Day” on the anniversary of our move to our neighborhood. (Directly inspired by this essay from James Matthew Wilson). We want to do something annually to mark our choice to be rooted where we are. (Full disclosure, I have intended this for the last two years without pulling it off, but we’ll see).

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If you have a favorite Berry quote or story, please share it in the comments

Whether you’ve read Berry or not, what’s something you’d like to say “no” to for the sake of giving a “Yes” to something or someone locally?

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I got to read and blurb his new book before publication, and he’s very thoughtful about balancing the real ways medicine and therapy can help mental illness, as well as the iatrogenic harms from taking therapy as the primary lens on human behavior.

When I speak on The Dignity of Dependence, I get thoughtful, good-faith questions about whether my project poses some of the same risks: We may all be dependent by nature, but if we think of that as core to our identity, will it become an excuse to stop using our particular strengths? To free-ride on others? To desire powerlessness/victimhood?

I think Matthew is a great person to have this conversation with. I’d love any questions or requests in the comments. You can read a thoughtful review of his book here.

Last week, I had a guest post in American Compass’s , in response to, well, the responses to AOC freezing her eggs and liveblogging the process.

Commonplace

Anti-Anti-Family Policy Is Not Pro-Family

“Don’t be weird about this,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) says, an injection needle poised over her belly as part of an attempt to freeze her eggs. “Even though I know all of you will be…

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2 months ago · 49 likes · 11 comments · Leah Libresco Sargeant

As I wrote in the piece:

A winning message on this issue begins by acknowledging that, insofar as women like AOC are pursuing egg freezing because they want to have children, they are motivated by a positive desire. Podcaster and MAGA world advisor Katie Miller took this tack, arguing that “if [Ocasio-Cortez] inspires other women to have babies, we should celebrate that.” However, while the desire for motherhood is indeed natural and admirable, it’s still important to ensure that this desire is directed to its proper ends.

Unfortunately, blue-state America does not trust social conservatives when it comes to matching up and settling down. The political divide is hard to bridge already, and we make it harder for ourselves when adopting what I call anti-anti-family rhetoric. Vice President JD Vance was right to apologize for his “childless cat ladies” crack, and pro-family advocates should avoid the temptation to take potshots at liberals for their supposed hypocrisy in having children. It’s one thing to say “Get Married,” but another to convince people who have been trying that they can better their chances. Our job on the Right is to credibly present ourselves as rooting for others to find happiness.

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In the full article, I spend some time exploring the actual stats of egg freezing (an expensive insurance policy for young women; deferred disappointment for the majority of older women), but I think this isn’t a fight that will be won by scolding people about the stats.

Winning a culture war in a pluralistic democracy is rarely done by squashing your opposition. You have to build durable majority, which means genuinely winning over people who are currently skeptical. (And, again, that requires credibly caring about their welfare, not just protecting your family from theirs).

I think the expansion of classical schools offers some lessons in what engaging the culture and your immediate community can look like:

Let’s consider a different domain, one where conservatives have had more success winning converts. The growing classical schools movement offers a positive alternative to traditional public schools, not just a critique. There are over 1,000 classical schools operating now in America, a quarter of which have opened since the COVID-19 pandemic. These schools take the liberal arts seriously and seek to form students’ character, not just their intellect. An anti-anti-public schools movement would primarily highlight overreach and error (and there are certainly big mistakes in this space that deserve it). But it’s hard for people to choose against something if there’s no viable alternative on offer.

The growing networks of classical schools are a witness to our neighbors, an invitation they can accept. They showcase that conservatives are saying no to the cultural default not out of reflexive contradiction but for the sake of saying yes to something better. I was surprised, when chatting with a non-religious friend in the Bay Area recently, to hear her say she was considering a Catholic school for her kids. After researching the issue, she believed that the parochial school in her area was focused on forming students as independent thinkers, while the public school was devolving into woke, Maoist self-criticism sessions. That’s what a win looks like.

Schools regularly host open house events and actively recruit new families. In order to promote alternatives to mainstream dating, marriage, and parenting, conservatives need to offer open houses of our own. My husband and I make a deliberate effort to invite single friends and young couples over for dinner with us and our three kids. When bedtime starts, we don’t send our guests home but instead invite them upstairs to read picture books to our children. (I love to hand someone I Want My Hat Back and watch them discover the violent volta as they’re reading). My kids tend to make bedtime a full-contact sport. It’s impossible to be a passive spectator.

If our guests are a couple that has been dating for a while, I sometimes hope that seeing each other play with my kids will help them start thinking about marriage. If it’s a single guy, I sometimes hope the experience will spur him to start dating seriously. But often I just want the joy that I’ve been given to spill over into other people’s lives. I remember how much it meant to me to be invited into my friends’ homes during my single days, and also later, during a season of loss after loss as my husband and I endured six miscarriages. Whether or not someone has kids of their own, no one should have a life totally devoid of children.

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You can cover the details of egg freezing and AOC specifically in the comments, but what I’m most interested is, in your own life and communities…

Where have you seen a minority group (ideological or cultural) host a successful “come and see” to let neighbors see how they live and why?

What’s the most different-from-your-own-norms place you’ve ever been welcomed for dinner or stayed over as a guest? What frictions couldn’t be avoided, and what surprised you?

Who is the national figure (who differs ideologically from yourself) who most clearly and credibly communicates that he or she is willing the good (as s/he understands it) of their opponents. (Mine’s Mamdani).

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Adding this song to our national repertoire would serve the same role that the psalms of lament do in the Bible. These psalms offer an invitation to prayer, and thus to hope, even in the bleakest moments. “Till We Reach That Day” does not reject America as rotten at the root, but it dwells in the wounds. It’s an anthem for America’s Puddleglums, who are fiercely loyal to a country they’re not sure they’ve ever inhabited.

And tomorrow, August 18th, I’ll be giving a talk online for the Institute of Catholic Culture on how to build thicker Christian community. I’ll be drawing on my second book, Building the Benedict Option, which a handbook of ways to build up community wherever you are right now, over the next two weeks to two months.

I really enjoyed the conversation that broke out in the comments of “A Large Family is a Polity” last month. I had shared (with some caveats) Catherine Pakaluk’s NYT op-ed “Life is Better with Siblings.” What I liked most about her piece was her emphasis on how belonging to a larger family gave children a sense of belonging to/being responsible for siblings who weren’t age peers.

Some of you had excellent stories about how your community let kids of different ages mix, no matter how large their families were:

I liked Jenny’s story about a baby who came to school:

I don’t have a perspective on big families, but my son’s teacher had a baby and upon her return to work, brought that baby into her age 3-6 primary class for the better part of a year. The students *adored* him, were so careful and tender with him, and the mama/teacher got to keep her baby in sight for an extra ~7 months or so before he graduated to an infant care room on the campus. It was such a win-win, and that teacher was so brave! to trust her masterpiece to a classroom full of preschoolers.

And I love how large and sprawling Mary Ellen’s family has become… by running a Catholic Worker home for moms and babies:

Our life is spent at a Catholic Worker women’s shelter, so there’s always a baby. Our choice was a smaller family-- 3 kids and a constant rotation of single moms with toddlers. As such, my kids take on child care all the time, often unpaid, and are often adored... But also learning how to draw boundaries and enforce discipline. We took a big group of older kids on a field trip yesterday and my teenage daughter noticed they were getting bored and immediately broke out her repertoire of camp songs. My middle kid finds the introverts and takes them aside, knowing that was once him. My youngest will never be the youngest. So much to love about a life of faith and action, but this post highlighted the large family we have that keeps getting larger.

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I asked where people saw the most age mixing in their community, and the two most common answers I got were church and homeschooling co-ops. (Which is very different than my own experience growing up and knowing only my own grade, plus a little mixing in extracurriculars).

Leslie had a particularly wide set of examples of age-mixed spaces:

Homeschool co ops are some of the least age-segregated spaces that we visit. This has been one of the best things about homeschooling. It is not something that everyone can or should do – I myself have doubts about it. But mitigating the strict age segregation of our society has been one of the biggest rewards I’ve found doing it. I feel like this could be recreated in schools to some degree. I mean, you wouldn’t have to make everything a one-room schoolhouse, but there could be more intentional effort to mix the ages.

Church is another place where the kids can often interact with a variety of ages. But this is hit or miss because a lot of churches themselves are very age segregated. We happen to go to a small church where there’s a lot of interaction with adults just because there aren’t that many other kids.

We are very lucky that we live in a neighborhood with a lot of kids. One of our neighbors started kickball at the local park on Friday nights. There’s a decent-sized group, and there are mixed ages from high school down to elementary. I don’t know how common something like this is- it’s very informal, and the kids are mostly in charge. Sometimes adults do come and play as well. But mostly it’s the group of kids playing and working things out. To me, this seems like something from a bygone era, but I’m really grateful that our kids get to experience it.

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William took aim at the narrow, nuclear family:

To expand on the point of there always being a last child, however, I would argue that’s an issue mainly because of the unique way we modern Americans live. Most people historically don’t live, as we do, away from extended family. If we lived in the same home or neighborhood as our cousins and uncles and aunts, the youngest child would almost always have nieces and nephews to bring out and train the instincts of parental responsibility in him. Same with the only child caveat; it doesn’t have to be unfair to them, as even they could be around baby nieces and nephews, or even just the children of neighbors and friends, if only he lived in a proper community. Today, a person like me, who grew up with many little children around to love, to require care, and to keep me attached to my home, is one of a very privileged few. That is truly an injustice. But in a healthy society, this would be the norm for most everyone.

Roxane was grateful for her own sister… and glad her own children have a larger family:

I had only one sister, a year and a half older, and while she was my world in so many ways, I see how that (more siblings) has only become exponentially more helpful as my children grow and begin to have adult relationships with one another. Our kids have so much more than I did with just one sister. Again, it was a great relationship but we were less connected at this stage than most of our kids are now. They just got done having a "Salonen kid" party at our oldest daughter's lake town -- without us. Which is great, because we're likely to be gone from this earth sooner than they and they will have each other.

And I want to make sure I amplify Mary’s question about how the youngest members of large families weigh their experiences:

As the almost youngest of a large family, I'm really intrigued by how much of the big family discourse, at least in my experience, seems to come from older siblings. I hear a lot of "I came from a big family, so I am really comfortable around kids" or "I've been changing diapers since I was ten" but I almost never hear the perspectives of the younger siblings. I don't know if that's just my experience or if younger siblings don't talk about it as much. My experience of growing up in a big family is not much like the big family discourse I often hear.

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Also, I’ll be speaking at the big conference Fairer Disputations is organizing in Rochester, NY this September. They’ve got an incredible lineup: Angela Franks, Gloria Purvis, Ivana Greco, Leah Jacobson… and this will be how I meet Stephanie Murray (of the Great Baby Swap) for the first time in person! If you want to attend, you need to apply on the website.

I have seen the two summer blockbusters! My husband correctly said that Spider-Man is completely, unambiguously Spider-Man in his film, and Odysseus… is not, but the movie is still a pleasure to watch and great to keep discussing. (Nolan’s Odysseus does not love lying).

I got to write about one element of Nolan’s choices in The Odyssey for the Dispatch, with a particularly Other Feminisms focus: How does Zeus’s Law (hospitality to strangers) protect even strong men?

Nolan’s film offers two reasons why people might commit to this kind of openhanded hospitality. First, there is a reason that points beyond the needs of men: Any beggar you entertain might be Zeus in disguise. Welcome him and receive his reward, or spurn him and suffer his wrath. Hospitality is not ultimately a way of receiving men—it’s a way to be prepared for the unannounced inbreaking of divinity. The stranger and the beggar are the beneficiaries of ambiguity—they receive what is owed to Zeus.

When the Greeks explain Zeus’ law to each other, their explicit reasoning always turns on the threat of the divine. But, as the story unfolds, their adventures suggest a second, unspoken reason to hold to Zeus’ law. The Greeks are a seafaring people, and Odysseus’ men, again and again, wash up on unknown shores. They want to live in a world that welcomes the stranger, because they expect to be that stranger. […]

However, Odysseus and his men keep hoping to rely on Zeus’ law even when they are at the peak of their strength. They are warriors, approaching coastal huts with weapons and armor. They are able to take what they want violently (and, in one of their first landings after they leave Troy, they do). But for the most part in this adaptation, part of their journey home is deliberately breaking their habits of rapine and pillaging. When they arrive on Circe’s island, for example, she anticipates beastly behavior, but the men make a point of disarming themselves and assuring her they will not harm or threaten her. Odysseus and his men want to be received as guests. Zeus’ Law even protects the strong, who can rely on it to avoid living by violence. They want strangers to choose to offer them what the crew could take by force.

If you are interested, I am running an Odyssey reading group on facebook, and we start next week! It’s two books a week, starting next week and running to Halloween. All translations welcome.

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I enjoyed seeing many people share this story of how cloistered nuns keep company with mothers in the night:

The Norbertine Canonesses, an order of Roman Catholic nuns in the Tehachapi Mountains of California, are famous for their selflessness. They sleep for an hour or two before their alarm goes off at 11:45 p.m. every night. They climb out of bed, pull habits over their hair and walk to a cold chapel for the first of their seven daily prayers. They wait in the pews, quiet, for midnight to arrive. When it comes, they begin to chant and pray for anyone who may need help — with insomnia, addiction or a crying newborn.

“Just as the mother rises in the middle of the night, so we rise,” the leader, Mother Mary Oda, told me.

That night, I rose with them. I’d come to visit the nuns because they had gone viral. New mothers online had been moved that someone, somewhere, would get up each night to feel their pain.

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Some years ago, when I was writing a feature on the Trappists of New Melleray Abbey, I heard a similar story from one of the religious brothers. (Content warning: the feature is about the Trappists ministry of providing coffins to bereaved parents and includes multiple stories of child loss).

They were a silent presence beside me and my husband, even if they didn’t know we were relying on them. They are used to their prayers reaching further than they know. Fr. Albrich, a 62-year-old Trappist, told me that one of his favorite prayers he offers in community is the one they offer at three in the morning. They recite together, “Lord as we keep watch with you this night, we commend all people and their lives to you.” The monks list the categories of people they remember, ending with “those who use the night to do evil, those who are afraid of the day about to dawn. May they all come out into the light of your Day.”

I couldn’t help but picture a cartoon mugger, sneaking up on a victim, and, in his shadow, a silent monk, stooped with age, matching his steps. Did he suspect he was accompanied, and for such a purpose? This, Fr. Albrich said, is the “paradox of cloistered orders.” Although they withdraw physically from the world, they remain present in prayer.

The monks themselves have been surprised by how much fruit has been borne by their prayer and work, or at least by how generous God has been in revealing this to them. By pledging their lives as monks, they trust that God will use their service for good, and they don’t assume that they will see what He does with their offering.

Perhaps that’s why they were so unprepared for the crowds that came when the monks offered their first public memorial mass for all those who had been buried in their coffins. “It was like the Vietnam War memorial,” Br. Joseph recalled. “People stood in line for an hour to look through the books on the altar.” He saw one woman drop to the ground, overcome when she touched the name of the person she had lost. The books record, by hand, the name of everyone who is buried in the monks’ coffins, and prayers are said for every person.

Getting to visit their workshop and interview these men has been the greatest gift my freelance writing has ever given me.

In your own lives, I’d be curious to know:

When has it meant a lot to you to be welcomed as a guest, when you could have been received as a customer or someone else who “wasn’t in need of help”?

When have you been close to someone without being with them physically?

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I got to see The Odyssey last week and really enjoyed it on net. I said going in that I wanted the bow-stringing to be as thrilling as it was the first time I ever saw it adapted—which was as a kid watching Wishbone—and BOY did I get my wish.

Feel free to treat the comments as an open thread; it’s a movie that rewards kibitzing. I have some grudges I’m holding (the BED!), but part of why I liked seeing the movie and chatting with people after is because Nolan is earnestly trying to retell the story. There are distortions, but they make the movie a double portrait of Odysseus, and what made Nolan decide this is what he wanted to spend years of his life struggling with. The movie feels like Jacob wrestling with an angel, asking it to bless him.

If you view it, as I did, in the way you would a Shakespeare staging at your local theater, you see people telling the story again because they love it. Not every choice is perfect, but the stakes are low—you know the story is immortal and people will keep telling and re-telling it.

Which brings me to…

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Today’s post exists primarily as a PSA. I wanted to make sure that everyone knows that Hadestown, one of the best musicals of the last decade, is coming to movie theaters for just one week. They taped the original Broadway cast (spectacular!) and the proshot is coming to movie theaters.

This is going to be our two big kids’ first trip to a movie theater. And I’m asking you to trust me on this one and check if it’s playing near you.

Hadestown is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The trailer is here, and will give you a good sense of the music and mood:

I love this show, and I got to cover it years ago for The American Interest.

A story of gods and men requires magic, and the show achieves its moments of transcendence by hanging onto a scrappy, small-budget sensibility, with an admirable restraint that is sometimes lacking in Broadway transfers. In “Wedding Song,” for instance, when Eurydice is won over by Orpheus’s courtship, his singing animates the set. There’s no wirework (which must be a relief to the actor playing Orpheus, Reeve Carney, previously star of the perilous Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark). Instead, the five-person chorus moves tables and hoists chairs, giving shape to Orpheus’s promise that, despite his poverty, “The trees are gonna lay the wedding table.”

In another show, this might be part of the heightened tone of theater, unremarkable as the act of singing is in musicals. Orpheus seems to experience it that way, but Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) clearly experiences it as diegetic action. She turns in confusion to see the usually invisible extras and takes in Orpheus with new eyes. There is a real magic to his song, and the cynical Eurydice, focused purely on survival, begins to consider there might be something more to the world…

Hades tempted Eurydice into death by offering her Lethe’s oblivion as a solution to the difficulties of life. The residents of Hadestown recite his promises in “Chant II:” “He said he’d shelter us. He said he’d harbor me.” The gods have forgotten who they are, too. In Hadestown the goodness of being is a truth we have trouble remembering, a song we lose the beat of.

Trust me on this one.

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Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas is an encyclical that is as much about what humans are as about what AI may become. I’ve got a piece up at First Things (“Worth Beyond Our Works”) on what Pope Leo has to say about human value when, like Gary Kasparov, we’re no longer best.

In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo singles out as “particularly insidious” the ideology that “suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth.” This view—where the human person is born in debt, and eventually buys him or herself free—obviously puts the very young and the very old in danger. But now it imperils many others who fear they will not be able to justify their lives if their labor can be done more cheaply and speedily by AI.

The encyclical has advice about how to apply the principles of Catholic social teaching to blunt the economic turbulence anticipated over the next ten years, but it has much more to say about why people cannot be treated as interchangeable parts, easy to throw away. Most importantly, the Church sees human dignity as springing from our being, not our doing. As Pope Leo writes: “The dignity of every human being can be described as infinite . . . for two reasons: first, because the love of God, who calls us to friendship with him, is infinite; and second, his love is absolutely unconditional, in the sense that, even if we search endlessly, we will never find anything that can erase or deny it.” […]

The coming years will sharply remind everyone of their finitude, of the fragility of an identity grounded in our doing. For those who do not know God, what alternatives will be open to them? What other avenues are there to find an identity in our being, not our doing? If you set God aside, there are still parts of our identities that are received as a gift, not won as a prize. They are the marks of particularity—being born as a man or a woman, into a particular nation, as a member of a particular race. However, when these markers are the seat of someone’s self-worth, they lead to rivalry and attempts to establish hierarchy. As AI capacities surge, I would expect to see more of these fragmented identities attract populist energies. They offer a possible answer to the question of the coming years: “What gives you worth, if not what you can do?”

Ultimately, I think Magnifica Humanitas will be remembers as much as a pro-life encyclical as a AI encyclical.

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As Pope Leo wrote, in one of the most Other Feminisms-y passages in the encyclical:

Christy reflected on this passage in our Magnifica Humanitas open thread:

This is the section I keep coming back to, over and over again. The entire argument about AI actually hinges on this understanding of who is human, and how and why, and what it means to be human, and what is and is not part of the human experience. I've read these few paragraphs a half dozen times already.

Penelope connected Pope Leo’s encyclical to another book I really like:

You intrigued me with your prompt about how Pope Leo’s account of human dignity might clash with meritocracy, because I recently read an interesting book that criticizes meritocracy.

The book is The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel. Sandel argues that meritocracy is not as great or fair as it seems because people who are already fortunate have the greatest advantages, it ignores chance and luck, and it encourages people to be sore losers and sore winners. Sandel also argues that a better way includes taking luck (good and bad) into account and finding and supporting a vision of the common good. He convinced me with his arguments, and I can’t wait to see how Pope Leo’s encyclical discusses dignity and the common good.

Kevin noted how true one passage rang in the hardest moments:

My grandmother died this past week. We were very close, and I managed to visit her the night before her death, despite being warned by an aunt that she was "not the Nanny you remember." (She was indeed in rough condition, but she still recognized me and we exchanged some very heartfelt words.) So, naturally, this is the sentence that stood out to me: "To eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well." Exactly right!

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A major theme of Magnifica Humanitas is that it’s important to take the right risks. Although some people anticipated that the Pope would anathematize AI, the encyclical is fairly dynamist. The Pope exhorts his people, “Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the ‘construction site’ of our time.”

For The New Atlantis, I have a piece arguing that the Pope is both more ambitious and more hopeful than some of the loudest futurists:

In its colloquial usage, humility can be misunderstood as performative smallness. The person who aggressively dodges praise — “It was nothing,” “I didn’t do much,” “Please don’t mention it” — is sometimes described as humble because she appears to reject pride in her work and recognition from others.

This kind of humility is focused on seeking smallness in isolation, whereas true humility is relational — a person is always small in relationship to God’s sublime largeness. In contrast, perfecting yourself through self-abnegating humility means becoming smaller and smaller until you disappear completely. Rationalist Ozy Brennan glosses this form of humility as “the life goals of dead people.” If you seek humility by seeking to minimize harm, or minimize the demands you make, then the best kind of person is one who isn’t there.

The swaggering e/acc — effective accelerationists who look at building as an inherent good — may sound like the opposite of this form of self-erasing humility. They want to play a big role in authoring the future, and they want that future to sprawl across the solar system and then the galaxy. But, for all the grandiosity of their goals, they share a horror at the human person with those who long to be small. An e/acc manifesto states that they are posthumanists, not transhumanists, because they have “no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life.” They have the self-erasing humility of the person who wants to be permanently passed over. They have a misplaced hunger for an intelligence that far excels humans, and that, because it surpasses us, cannot love us or exist in relation to us. It is hard for them to imagine why a truly superior being would care more for us than we do for ants. They propose a kind of silicon supercessionism: an indifferent sublime, God without the Incarnation.

I’m grateful that AI is awakening people’s desire to talk about what it means to be human.

Has AI sparked interested conversation about what it means to be human in your own life?

How do you discern the difference between humility and self-abegnation?

When have you had to give up a sense of who you are that was grounded in doing not being?

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I enjoyed most of Catherine Pakaluk’s recent NYT op-ed “Life is Better with Siblings.” Pakaluk is the author of Hannah’s Children, an ethnography of college-educated women with five or more children. She is currently working on a companion book focused on dads of large families.

Her NYT op-ed urges parents to turn away from a high-control, risk-averse approach to parenthood, in which you try to make things perfect for your kid. As every parent knows, adding siblings means adding chaos and giving up control. (With three, we often have bedtimes that would be stable but for one kid provoking or disrupting another).

Pakaluk argues that the small polity of a large family gives children more opportunities to develop character, because they must learn to live alongside unchosen people. And it means parents don’t burden themselves with the idea they must be everything to their children—they will play with, fight with, and model themselves on other people too.

Most of all, she writes:

I know this from my own life. My mother had her last two children, my seventh and eighth siblings, when I was in high school. Their births were the happiest times of my teenage years. My social life could be up or down, but those kiddos always adored me. I wanted to live up to the role. My youngest siblings kept me closer to home, and provided ballast through the inevitable difficulties of those years. They are still my closest friends, the first I turn to in hard times. […]

These were not exceptional cases. I wasn’t even probing for them. But mother after mother described some version of the same dynamic — a struggling older child steadied, sometimes significantly, by the responsibility and tenderness of caring for a younger one. Today’s middle-school- and high-school-age children rarely have that experience. They do not share a home with an infant or an adoring toddler. Many will not even remember a time when they did.

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I’ve seen this play out vividly with my own children. Each of my two older girls are very different people than they would be if they were not big sisters. This is most apparent with my middle girl, who was happy to tag along in the shadow of her big sister until her little brother was born.

She still wants to do big kid scooting and imaginative play, but she also locked on to a person younger than herself, adopting him as her special responsibility and shooing me away. “I be his mama now, Mama, you be da babysitter.”

He may follow her into a new tenderness, but it’s too early to know if it will be via a younger sibling of his own. However many kids you have, there is always a last baby, and civilizing that child requires turning outward.

I wrote a little about this, while I was still pregnant with my son, in The Dignity of Dependence:

The new rules [NO JUMPING ON MAMA’S BELLY] came before they could have a face-to-face meeting with the person they were safeguarding. These “nos” certainly prompted some conflict and screaming, but my period of need also drew out unexpected tenderness. Even a two-year-old is big enough to sometimes catch the awe that accompanies fragility. But for her to learn this open-eyed, open-hearted response to weakness requires risk on someone else’s part. It requires my own bodily weakness, endured through each pregnancy, my willingness to risk a little bit of my comfort and health as she learns care and caution, my willingness to let the girls play with their brother after birth as I balance his safety with the immediacy and intensity of their love.

For whichever child is the last one I bear, a good part of his or her education will come through someone else’s baby. That smallest son or daughter will depend on the greater generosity of friends, family, and strangers. The final child of mine will need to turn outward to those who bear children in their turn and allow my youngest child to crowd their babies with love and try out the special responsibility that comes with largeness and strength.

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Thus, I think it’s fair to read Pakaluk’s piece as for siblings, certainly, but also making a strong case against a norm of age segregation for kids broadly. Young kids need more than near peers and adults. They need to be responsible for small babies and look up to bigger kids.

I love the Roots of Empathy program, that brings a baby into kindergarten for repeated visits, so the littlest students learn how to be tender with someone small:

Roots of Empathy instructor Marilyn Enloe visits the classroom 27 times over the course of the year and for nine of those visits baby Claire will be there as well with her mother, Jenny Fitzpatrick. It’s Enloe’s job to help students observe the baby’s development and to label Claire’s feelings.

The class then reflects on why Claire is either happy or sad and discusses how the children often have similar feelings…

As for Jenny Fitzpatrick, Claire’s mother, she says she was never worried about bringing her daughter into a classroom and that she enjoys watching the kindergartners’ reactions.

“The tone of the room changes when Claire comes in,” Fitzpatrick said, “and I think kids start to think about how it feels to be treated a certain way, because they don’t like it when she gets upset.”

If you had a larger family, with many siblings, where did you benefit from the demands they made on you?

Where (when growing up or as an adult) do you spend the most time with people of a very different age than yourself?

If you have kids, what are the least age-segregated spaces you go?

Do you have near peers, five to ten years older than you, with whom you have deep friendships and look to as examples? How did you find them?

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(I have some other caveats about Catherine’s piece, but I’m sticking them in the first comment to keep this post focused)

I wanted an extension that interrupted my use of twitter. When I opened the site, I wanted an interstitial page that showed a prayer intention, randomly chosen from a list I could edit, and gave me time to pray before I could go on to Twitter. And now… thanks to Claude… I’ve got it.

As I wrote for The Dispatch:

I’ve been using it every day since, and about 30 people have joined me. It works just as I hoped—sometimes prompting me to close the Twitter tab I opened mindlessly, sometimes just subordinating the virtual social network to the spiritual social dimension of prayer.

I accepted one form of friction (the struggle to master a new coding tool) for the sake of precisely controlling the form of friction I really cared about. I’m excited about the future of vibe coding (code written through prompting AI in plain English, rather than in coding language) because I think it will give ordinary people more control over their screen-mediated life. Vibe coding will make it a lot easier for everyone to reshape and resist the glide paths laid out for them by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others. Especially people who have never coded at all.

My next project was making a custom tool to help me, my husband, and our friend plan our GenCon schedules together. I like feeling like more of the world is tractable. It’s like a 3D printer, but for processes, not physical objects.

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For a cautionary note on not having friction in the right places, try this from Eve Fairbanks for The Atlantic.

Ten years ago I composed a reconciliatory email to a boyfriend but never sent it, because I couldn’t get the phrasing right. Only much later did I realize I simply didn’t mean what I’d been trying to write. If I’d had an AI program to help me get over the hump, I’d be married to a different person. A much less suitable one.

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Finally, on the AI front, I had a wonderful time sitting down with Oren Cass, Chris Griswold, and Max Bodach to talk about the pope’s new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. I’ll have a little more writing on the encyclical coming out in the next few weeks, but I loved doing this podcast with good faith interlocutors who are interested and interesting. Half the table is Catholic, half not.

I got to host a Magnifica Humanitas book club at my house last week, and when everyone introduced themselves, I had them mention what their use of AI (if any) looked like. We had a big spectrum, from someone actively trying to step back from her current level of reflexive use, to a missionary living in a house where they didn’t use the internet by default.

I really enjoyed discussing these tools with women all focused on how (if at all) they could help turn us toward the fully human, rather than away from each other.

Where would you like to add friction in your use of technology? What would it look like?

Where has struggling forced you to realize you shouldn’t push forward as Fairbanks found, and artificial ease would have misled you?

If Nicole Ruiz (of ) and I ran a “Hackathon for Homemakers” — a day of vibecoding projects to help manage your home/have a tool that is exactly right for your family, what would you want to try to build?

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I have not yet finished reading Magnifica Humanitas, the pope’s new encyclical on AI.

I was (checks notes) too busy hosting Rosary Moms and making a caramelized garlic tart for dinner with friends to read more than two chapters on the necessity of human connections in an age of machines on the day of publication. ;)

But so far, there’s one theme that stands out to me. As Pope Leo said a few days before the encyclical: “It is imperative to recover an understanding of the true meaning and grandeur of humanity as intended by God. It is in this sense that the challenge we currently face is not technological, but anthropological.”

The encyclical (so far) is much more about what humans are, and what that implies about how we should live together (and what we may and may not excise from ourselves) than it is about machines.

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This is, as you might imagine, very satisfying to me, especially as my The Dignity of Dependence is also making the argument that we can’t build a just society if we start with a false idea of the human person.

As I’ve been reading, the passage below in the encyclical struck me as especially Other Feminisms-relevant:

The limit, the heart and the grandeur of the human person

118. Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them. The light of faith offers a perspective on reality that helps us recognize what we call the “contingency” of the things of this world. While it is right to strive to alleviate the suffering that marks human life, it is also wise to acknowledge our fundamental finitude, knowing that “religious experience, and in particular Christian faith, propose that we live, without oversimplification, this ambivalence between human greatness and limitation, interpreting it in the light of our original and fundamental relationship with God.” [131]

119. It is precisely within our limitations that the following find a place: compassion, as well as a sincere concern for the needs of others; a generosity that can emerge even in the midst of darkness and failure; spiritual experience and the worship of God. We see this at many moments when our limits become tangible: when we face rejection, when we suffer the illness or loss of a loved one, when we encounter our own weakness or failure. Mysteriously, it is precisely in such moments that we can discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others and encounter the presence of the Lord.

120. Even when limitations are experienced as inner suffering, human wisdom teaches us not to deny or suppress it, but to integrate it. To eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well. Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering; and over the years, we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars, the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments. It is only thanks to the interplay of these elements that the wonders of the soul occur within us, allowing us to sense the richness of our humanity. [132] To renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid, in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human.

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The last paragraph in the selection above dovetails well with how I closed The Dignity of Dependence.

I grew up prepared to use my strength to advocate for my sisters, but the more I grow, the more I have found I must offer the testimony of my weakness as well. I want my daughters and my son to see me as more than just myself — composed of my ties to them and the ties to husband, families, and friends that allow me to give of myself without always being sure my own body can cover the cost.

When I told my oldest that I needed more gentleness in the last month of pregnancy, that I was fragile, she was skeptical — How could I be weaker when I was so much bigger? It is the largeness of our love that exposes us to risk. I count my treasure in my exposure to catastrophe. I measure my humanity in how little my life and my loves can be sustained by my own strength.

I’d love to hear what stands out to you if you’re reading Magnifica Humanitas.

What quotes stand out to you?

Where does Pope Leo’s account of human dignity clash with e.g. the meritocracy / the Protestant work ethic?

What are you hoping to see more religious leaders weigh in on?

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The bill is a ways from becoming law, but getting a team of bipartisan, serious representatives behind the effort is a good first step toward seeing this bill included in a big tax package down the road. The bill got endorsements from serious think tanks on the left and right, too.

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If you’d like to go into the weeds on the design of the program, I’ve got a detailed writeup here. And I’ve got a short explainer below

For the last two years, I’ve been working as a Senior Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center, with a focus on family policy. I’ll still be doing some family policy work with them as a Senior Fellow, but, this week, I’ve started a new job as the Editorial Director at the Institute for Progress. This blog remains just for me, without being run by any of my employers, past or present.

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And I’ve got a recent piece up at the Dispatch on the flexibility of people’s plans for future children. The data you collect on fertility plans can change a lot depending on how you ask the questions:

One pilot study contrasted how women answered a stark question about whether they were currently trying to get pregnant, offering the options “yes,” “no,” or “don’t know,” and found that only 2 percent of women picked the ambivalent answer. But when they offered the same women a broader set of options (“trying to get pregnant,” “wouldn’t mind getting pregnant,” “don’t know,” “wouldn’t mind avoiding pregnancy” and “trying to avoid a pregnancy”) 10 times as many women (22 percent) picked one of the middle three ambivalent options.

Plus…

In practice, most fertility questions are more complicated than yes or no. It can be helpful to talk about fertility intentions in the aggregate, but not so helpful to ask a friend, “So, are you done, or do you want another?” when she’s holding a newborn in her arms. The answer she may give immediately postpartum isn’t necessarily the answer she’ll give by the time her cycles resume, or when this baby becomes a toddler.

There are some contexts in which “how many children do you want?” is a helpful question. If you know you hope for three or more, then, realistically, you’d like to try to get started sooner. If you want a larger family, then advice that presumes babyhood is a brief, passing interruption of your real life won’t be helpful to you. High attachment parenting has a very different cost for a mother of one than a mother of four. But, for the most part, you only have to make choices about one baby at a time. You can’t decide whether you feel ready for baby N+2 until after you’ve had baby N+1.

I had fun writing this, and I’d be curious about your own experience making plans about future children.

Did you ever feel you were ‘done’? Did that feeling persist or shift?

Have you had times with ambiguous feelings about trying to conceive or avoid? Did you try to take an ambivalent path?

(Have you called your congressperson to ask them to sign on to the Supporting Newborn Parents bill?)

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Second, I want to point back at the comments to Débora Luciano’s longer response to where she and I agree and differ (interesting throughout!) which begins as follows:

Our starting point seems to be the same: the inescapable reality of the body and the knowledge of its suffering.

The female body confronts us with asymmetry, limitation, vulnerability, and, as you put it way better than me, dependence. For women in particular, these realities are difficult to ignore, because they are inscribed so visibly in fertility, pregnancy, and in the long history of expectations that have surrounded them.

Some time ago, we had a lively conversation on the limits of the body sparked by a NYT feature on ACL injuries in girls sports. As the article pointed out: Girls are 3-6x more likely than boys to tear their ACLs in youth sports. Girls committed to year-round soccer schedules have a 1 in 6 chance of tearing their ACL before getting their high school diploma.

Part of this is the result of not offering girls warm up exercises that are tailored to their particular bodies, and respond to the real asymmetries between men and women. Part of it is a frustration (that men are vulnerable to, too) that you need to take time away from the real sports work to do the extraneous-feeling stretches. Shouldn’t the body just work without so much maintenance?

I asked Other Feminisms readers to respond to a few questions, including:

Where do you find it hardest to see the body as cross and gift?

Where do you spot temptations toward “a gnostic refusal of… suffering, of incarnation, and ultimately of creation itself” outside the domain of sexed asymmetries?

Where do you find it hardest to accept that frailty is not a passing interruption of a natural state of strength?

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I appreciated Bethany’s firm response to “When is it alleviation of suffering and when is it refusal of suffering?”

Every example I can think of can go either way, yet it would be an even more cruel and unjust world if culture prioritized acceptance of suffering over alleviation. Am I refusing my createdness if I seek hormone therapy to ease my perimenopause symptoms? Brain fog, fatigue, depression, and anxiety already threaten to consume my waking hours, and it’s only been a few months (I have other tell-tale symptoms as well, but these are the burdensome ones). Do laboring mothers reject frailty when they use epidurals?

I appreciate the idea of accepting one’s own givenness, I even advocate for it at times. And I know that it is often pro-life to alleviate suffering. So perhaps it’s the brain fog, but I’m having trouble seeing how these values are balanced here.

I replied in thread, but, in brief, I think there are times when it is all attitude, and you could have two women receiving the same treatment (say, an epidural) in different spirits, one of which represented a rejection of the body, one of which did not.

A good friend of mine suggested, before my first delivery, that if I was ever going to have an epidural, I should do it for my first labor. The first labor is usually the longest, she said, and the one where you most want to get relief, take a little rest, and reserve your strength for pushing.

She framed her recommendation through what best served my body as it was. Someone else could have framed it as a response to the injustice of labor being hard / described a desire to absent herself, which wouldn’t have been compelling for me at all. (I did not have an epidural—I did have an emergency C section when my baby was in distress after an hour of pushing). I appreciated the section on epidurals in Emily Oster’s Expecting Better where she and a friend go through the pros and cons and make opposite choices based on how they weight the pluses and minuses.

Overall, I think about whether I’m trying to restore wholeness/integrated function or whether I feel like I’m rejecting the body as encumbrance. And I have a little bit of an attraction to the playfulness of some transhumanist ideas (like sticking a magnet in your hand). But 1) I haven’t done it and 2) if I did, I hope I’d do it in the spirit of an architect designing an arch in playful collaboration with gravity, rather than in the spirit of seeing my body as what has so memorably termed “a meat Lego.”

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Elizabeth took a crack at “Where do you find it hardest to accept that frailty is not a passing interruption of a natural state of strength?”

Where support is not immediately available--a widespread problem w/o a singular clear solution. It’s all very well to say and believe that I personally have physical limits or needs--but what about the effects on people who also depend on me? Like, if I need to stay in bed all day, my young children are going to be negatively affected, b/c my husband’s job is not set up for flexibility and, while we do have supportive friends, we don’t currently have grownups who could drop everything to help on a moment’s notice. It sometimes feels more “realistic” to just try to muscle through, even though that’s ultimately less truthful (not to mention more harmful)!

Her answer parallels a question I’ve gotten repeatedly throughout the Dignity of Dependence book tour: Aren’t there some good things about stigmatizing dependence? Doesn’t the desire to not be dependent impel people to push harder, to overcome things they can overcome, rather than lie back and give up / mooch off of others?

I usually answer by saying that I think lots of the good things that come out of yearning for independence can be better sought through the language of stewardship.

How can I do right by what’s been entrusted to me?

How can being entrusted change my view of myself and how I want to grow to be worthy of that trust?

When does doing right by what I steward mean asking for someone else to step in when my strength fails?

I think we can be called to be faithful stewards of our wounds and weaknesses, as well as of our strengths and talents. Each is entrusted to us for today, with no promise made of what will come tomorrow. How can I act rightly now, based on what I have had placed in my hands?

I just think you have to hold all these things (including strengths) lightly, expecting some day you will have to set them down.

As Emily wrote in response to “Where do you find it hardest to accept that frailty is not a passing interruption of a natural state of strength?”

Increasing age. All of the brain synapses still know how to direct performance of dozens of tasks that the rest of the body just can’t carry out. The disconnect between what your brain can direct and what your body can carry out can be simply maddening. Or... it can just be a flat lesson that you are not the boss of you.

A full anthropology needs a way to articulate what a good life looks like during periods of illness and aging, not just seasons of high agency.

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Second, I’m doing a hybrid book club on The Dignity of Dependence with Feminists Choosing Life of New York on May 13th. You can attend in person in Rochester, NY, or virtually from anywhere (I’ll be beaming in). Registration link is here.

A trio of my favorite thinkers on policy, hospitality, and the built environment have had good pieces lately. First up, a team up between and for Capita: “Hospitable by Design: Toward Institutions and Communities That Welcome Families.” Here are some of their recommendations that you can advocate for at the local level:

• Create a flat family pricing structure at museums and theaters where families do not have to pay a per-child fee. Not only did this garner strong support in the poll, but 61% of respondents also said they would be “very” or “somewhat” willing to see taxes raised to pay for it.*

• Invest more in public libraries, public pools, and public splash pads to extend their hours and in the maintenance and safety of public parks.*

• Improve walkability and “strollerability” in neighborhoods by prioritizing sidewalk repair and curb cuts in areas with many families and adding sidewalks where there are gaps.

• Adopt “slow streets” near schools and child care programs that limit vehicles’ speed and idling, if not entirely closing them off from through traffic during school hours.

• Use planning and community development mechanisms to encourage co-locating family and children’s services (as well as elder care services) or “care blocks” that centralize services such as child care, laundromats, legal aid for women, and so on.

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I am very very pro making public parks family friendly “third places” and it’s easy to miss cheap, critical features that make them family friendly. My neighborhood overhauled our “Tot Lot” which is especially well suited to preschoolers and… removed the latchable gate, despite protest from parents.

Now kids who have runners can dart directly into the street, whereas before the renovation, there was a point where toddlers would be stymied. It’s a lot harder for families with multiple kids to enjoy the park now, while parents with just one kid have the (bad) option to hover.

Now, this one, I like in theory, but I am very very skeptical of in practice.

This can start from the top, in the form of documents and procedures aimed at cultivating more family-friendly environments. For instance, a state or city office might request a “family impact statement,” similar to an environmental impact statement, that assesses proposed rules or policy changes by how they might make it easier or harder for families to flourish or find community. A new government service or program might have the best of intentions, but if it is not implemented with an eye towards how parents with young children will actually apply for, navigate, and use the program, it will fail to achieve its desired ends.

I just cannot look at NEPA and other “write more reports” roadblocks and feel enthusiastic about adding one more speedbump, even when it’s aligned with my goals. I know Patrick and Elliot probably mean this kind of regulation to catch problems like the one I describe above, but, to be honest, I think I want to try to address it mainly through electing family-friendly politicians, and not with a new set of regs.

(Our city’s facebook page included complaints about seeing too many kids in parochial school uniforms in the Tot Lot after school, indicating to those community members that the school was ?hogging? the park). Sigh.

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Elsewhere at Comment, has a lovely piece titled “Pattern Recognition.” (Sara’s spectacular book, What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, is one of the most influential on The Dignity of Dependence.) She begins with a consideration of the sideshow incubates and builds out from there:

You can see the foundling wheel’s long tail of influence—a kind of loose, dotted-line design heritage—in its contemporary counterparts. As with so many charitable structures eventually subsumed under welfare–state management in the United States, the baby box now is built into the sides of fire stations, with a “no questions asked” proviso and high-tech warming features. In some parts of the world, rescue services are still run by charitable organizations: Door of Hope in Johannesburg has received nearly two thousand babies in its quarter century of operation. Their “door” is also a small hatch built into the side of a building structure, but their services extend beyond infancy to young children—facilitating adoptions, family reunification, and early childhood services.

Another kind of box design helps families get strong material starts in their own homes: The Finnish baby box, recently replicated in New York City, gives parents a box full of supplies like diapers and onesies. A small bundle of caregiving equipment for the smallest humans, given in a spirit of collective responsibility.

It can be hard to fully appreciate this kind of design for the astonishing, radical statement in its provision: that the babies of strangers carry the kind of dignity that is tantamount to those of close kin and tribe. It’s an idea that had to be invented, that goes against the self-preserving optimization of communities adapted for fitness. This kind of dignity makes claims on a collective, perhaps a polity. “Design for dignity” is easy to affirm at the high level of uncontroversial principles, but in practice it too often takes on the straightforward structure of unidirectional charity, as though dignity were a good or service extended from those who somehow “have” it to those who somehow lack it. A sharper term from theologian Helmut Thielicke might get us closer to what’s true: Dignity is not a possession to be more fairly meted out but a universally contingent relational force—a bracing state of human dependency on divine sustenance, a vitality on which each human life hangs every second.

I am really hoping Sara has a second book in progress. In the meantime, it seems like a good time to mention that I keep a very casual “Other Feminisms” wishlist of books that seem germane to our ongoing conversation. I do not promise that if someone sends me a book, I will get to it in a timely way, but I will make an exception for lost in space: Architecture and Dementia, which has been in and out of print, if anyone sends it my way.

I’ve really enjoyed discussions of the built environment at Gallaudet, the university built for Deaf students, where the wide halls and rounded corners are meant to make it easy to carry on a visual conversation in ASL, walking in large knots of students.

Where have you found yourself in a place that was strikingly ungeneric in design—welcoming you as a visitor, but tuned to the particular needs of children, the Deaf, or some other group?

What are the most and least family-friendly features of your own neighborhood? How did they wind up built that way?

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I’ve printed stickers and magnets (as below) for you to give alongside the book (or keep as a bonus for yourself).

You can claim a sticker or magnet if you buy The Dignity of Dependence or any of my previous books. Both are about two inches square. Magnets are first come, first serve, because I have fewer of them.

You can sign right up here to send me your receipt and your address.

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A quick reminder of what’s on offer below:

The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto

The book that grew out of this substack! My book lies at the intersection of these two claims:

• Women’s equality with men is not premised on our interchangeability with men.

• Dependence on others is not a temporary embarrassment at the beginning (and end) (and much of the middle) of our lives but the pattern for how we live together.

Building the Benedict Option: A Guide to Gathering Two or Three Together in His Name

A practical guide to creating thicker Christian community where you are now, over the next two weeks to two months. I’ve loved hearing from readers about what they tried out. One reviewer: “I particularly enjoyed Libresco's suggestion to take things you would typically do alone, and do them as a group. It inspired me to send a text out to my son's class' mom group and plans for acts of mercy are in the works for next week.”

Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers Even I Can Offer

This was my first book, and it tells the story of my conversion from atheist to Catholic, and how I learned to pray. As one reviewer wrote: “This book is really a practice manual, a helpful guide to expanding and growing that most important but most difficult of modern disciplines : a regular and disciplined prayer life.”

And, as a special bonus…

Back Again from the Broken Land

This is a tabletop RPG I wrote together with my husband. It’s inspired by “The Scouring of the Shire” at the end of The Lord of the Rings. You play small people who played a pivotal role in the defeat of the Doomslord, who now need to make the long walk home.

You can get the pdf at this link, and you can get a black and white print edition directly from me for $25 (including shipping).

To claim your bonus, fill out the form here. You’ll need your receipt, or, if you’re buying direct from me, a screenshot of your venmo or paypal payment to me.

And please tell me whom you’re getting a book for, and why!

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Check your local listings! It’s excellent. And you want to go with a friend to kibitz after.

Some time ago, I had a post here titled “Against Fractional Complementarity,” which sparked a lively conversation. I drew on several women writers I admire, particularly Abigail Favale, as below:

Fractional complementarity, then, sees the sexes as complementing one another because they each reflect partial or fractional aspects of a whole human being. Fractional complementarity tends to divvy up various human traits and virtues into pink and blue lists: men are more rational, let’s say, and women are more emotional, so together they make up for one another’s deficiencies—together, we account for a well-rounded human being.

Integral complementarity, in contrast, views men and women as whole human persons in their own right. The full range of human traits and virtues is open to cultivation by both sexes. Our complementarity, then, is synergistic—it does not complete a lack but enhances a whole, resulting in a fruitful collaboration that is more than the sum of its parts.

Men and women overlap significantly, and there are some strong statistical differences between men and women when our traits as a group (height, appetite for risk, etc) look like two overlapping, slightly offset bell curves. These are what Favale calls “second order” sex differences.

The “first order” ones are not like overlapping bell curves at all, but a fairly sharp binary: women are ordered toward the production of large gametes, men toward small gametes. (“Ordered toward” takes not that you do not cease to be a woman when your reproductive system functions poorly. I did not cease to be a woman when miscarrying—I experienced a distinctively and exclusively female form of loss).

I asked you readers a couple of questions, among them:

Do you agree with Favale’s distinction between “first order” and “second order” sex differences?

Where have the overlapping bell curves of personality-traits-by-gender felt most germane to you?

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Tessa wrote:

This is a great question. When we feel uprooted and adrift, it’s easy to fall into a regimented, lifeless, or fractional system, because we’re looking for something solid to hold on to.

My thought on why it is that we struggle with being non-reductionistic in our conception of what it means to be masculine and feminine is that it seems rooted in at least two things: (1) our increasing distance from ordinary community and from the ordinary cycles of life and death, around which a community would have specific rituals and traditions (one example is cooking: cooking within a particular food tradition rather than according to whatever a placeless expert says is both more grounding and freeing, and most likely healthier too), and (2) our lack of a symbolic/poetic imagination. We have a really hard time with metaphor and symbol nowadays, such that when we see something amiss—such as the erasure of traditions and differences of any kind—when we try to rectify it, it’s easy to replace the lost thing with a kind of hardened and actually imprecise understanding, which can lead to absurd notions, such as fortitude only being a masculine virtue.

There was a little discussion of the Greek tradition, which is pretty well glossed by this number from Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Dissent made a pitch for stronger gender norms and divisions, saying they can be arbitrary and important at the same time:

In society at large, we need more same-sex spaces, not fewer. It may be arbitrary who does the plowing of the field or the threshing of the grain, but in a particular community it is not arbitrary. The more comprehensive the divisions between the sexes the more flexible the whole thing becomes in times of necessity. (Women always take over male responsibilities in times of war, when men are off at war.) When men in a marriage know what their normal duties are they can work to get it done---and in times of necessity pick up the slack without worries. It might be your wife’s work to change diapers when you aren’t around, and you aren’t around often, but if you have that sense then, in your wife’s absence, you can do the Daddy diaper change without having that murky sense you are a traitor to your sex. That duty *is* arbitrarily female, but *because* it is firmly normative it *can* be assigned to the male in times of necessity, like when the wife is sleeping, working, showering, cooking, milling grain, or all the rest.

Unity (and equality) is only borne out when there is radical habitual division between men and women. Recognizing the call of necessity and the ability of the sexes to be interchangeable in any isolated task is only possible when it is an exception. When it is a norm, the identities of both men and women are lost.

I read this as partially saying it’s easier on everyone if you feel like your (and everyone else’s) understanding of you as a man/woman is strongly established. You’re not proving it day by day or frequently on the margin of “obviously” male or female.

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To that last point, I also asked you to reflect on some of Sr. Prudence Allen and Sr. Carino Hodder’s ideas that our embodied nature makes the same act “feminine” or “masculine” because of who’s doing it. The paradigmatic example is that a mother or father comforting a sleepy baby may both be shushing and rocking, but it’s true to say it’s maternal in one and paternal in the other.

Michael weighed in:

The idea that an act becomes masculine or feminine based on who's carrying out the act rings true to me as a stay at home dad. As my wife notes, there is something masculine about how I care for our kids and take care of our house, just like there's something feminine in how she does her work. It's hard to tease out all the differences, and how the work I do looks different by virtue of me being a father and a husband, but there is a difference there, certainly.

But Gemma didn’t find that Hodder/Allen’s framework resonated for her:

I don’t think that all of my acts are feminine acts by virtue of being done by a woman. There is no necessity that virtues have to play out “in a different key” in response to the body of the person doing it. We should be wary of going from a descriptive “men and women sometimes tend to enact virtues in observably different ways” to a totalising “virtues always become different when enacted by a man or a woman.” Sometimes what we are embodying is not “man” or “woman” but simply “neighbour” or “friend” or indeed “parent.” I’m all for recognising the importance of the specific relationship between a woman and the child she has birthed, but even then there are parental acts that need not take on a sexed character.

I think Sr Hodder has inadvertently implied that something has gone wrong if a woman is, at any given moment, not enacting the feminine in some sense. No doubt it is comforting, given that assumption, to hold that this has always already been achieved, but it actually needn’t always be necessary in the first place.

A user going by Beloved framed the question through Jesus and Mary:

“The act becomes fem/masc by nature of the actor” sounds appealing but not quite rich enough to me. The place I have pondered about masc/fem recently relates to our invitation to participate in giving of ourselves. Jesus sacrificed his body through death (and resurrection and ascension); Mary, through pregnancy, childbirth, nursing. But they both lived and died. The red martyrdom vs the white martyrdom - dying for Christ vs living for Christ - the difference to me today is which moment is more /obviously/ heroic. Continual renewal of purity of heart is painful, but usually invisible. Your literal heart ceasing to beat cannot be hidden. But rarely does one dare to die for Christ if one has not already lived for Christ; or, rather, to die in the body if not already in the will. Jesus lived, doing the Father’s will and not his own, his whole life, not just during his passion and death. If he hadn’t had that last bit, he would have died a white martyr; and plenty of women saints have died a red martyrdom (or died in childbirth). No definitive conclusions, more musings.

I enjoyed the discussion and there’s more in the original comments!

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A lot of people gave $20 each, and at least one person gave more than ten times that. I’m very grateful to have a mix of both—it’s what we’ve relied on to sustain K as she builds her new life. The group of women who have been the primary supports so far have a lot of variation in what we can give financially. I’ve been the bundler so that we can help without revealing who gave how much.

It takes a village.

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Relatedly, I really enjoyed this Plough essay from Matthew Burdette: “Everyone Is Eventually a Burden.”

Igot to know the theologian Robert W. Jenson during the final years of his life. Like many people, I first met him on the page, starting with his Systematic Theology. But I soon discovered that he and I worshiped at the same church and, not only that, we liked to sit in the same south transept. One Sunday, I leaned over the pew in front of me to where he was seated in a wheelchair and asked, “Are you Robert Jenson?” He looked at me perplexedly and, after a long pause, finally said, “Well, that’s my name.” Soon thereafter, I was invited to call him “Jens,” and before long I was visiting him at his home about twice each week. As our friendship grew, I would sometimes keep him company while his wife, Blanche, left the house so that he wouldn’t be alone. By this time, he was unable to get himself a drink or something to eat or walk unassisted to the bathroom.

On one occasion, after assisting him to and from the bathroom, Jens frustratedly muttered something about being a burden. I insisted, “You’re not a burden.” At this, he looked at me and said very clearly, “Yes, I am. Everyone is eventually a burden.”

His surprise at my pastorally inept response, and my surprise at his candor, centered around the same problem: my politeness.

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This is, of course, one of the major themes of The Dignity of Dependence. We all start out as a burden as a baby, even if it’s as a welcome, longed-for one. Almost all of us will have a period of burden-hood as we prepare to die. And those who don’t are not usually those we regard as lucky—those killed suddenly and unexpectedly in the prime of life through e.g. a car accident or a heart attack.

One of the small shifts I suggest in talks is answering “Thank you,” with a firm “You’re welcome,” rather than a “It’s nothing.” Through many little choices, we use politeness to screen out acknowledging asymmetries of need and debt.

And then? Well, as Burdette puts it:

The question that generally goes unasked and therefore unanswered is: what happens to people who are a burden once they have been totally buffered from the acknowledgment of this fact?

I suggest that such people will often do everything in their power to turn the polite denial into the truth: they will try not to be a burden. Politely denying that someone is burdensome in fact denies that person the freedom to be a burden, even when burdensomeness is involuntary, so that the person is weighed down by his or her own dependence. To be clear, this dynamic is not present in every experience of being burdened: for example, I love my children, and it really doesn’t bother me when my daughter or son wakes me up at night. Love has a way of blinding us to the cost of bearing other people. At the same time, neither my children nor my love for them would be served were I to pretend that I’m not exhausted after a series of nighttime interruptions. Love may relieve the feeling of being burdened, and it energizes us to give of ourselves, but it does not alter the basic fact we must carry one another and that we get worn down. When we pretend that we are not exhausted by the demands put on us, the very love that binds us to ones whose burdens we carry is malformed into a force that keeps us apart and isolates us and those who depend on us.

How have you seen burden-hood and asymmetry of need deflected?

What’s one of the best ways you’ve seen it acknowledged openly?

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First up, I have a spot where I could use some help, and I figure Other Feminisms readers might be the ones to ask. I’ve been helping to support a woman who fled domestic violence with her son for the past two years (in concert with a group of ~30 women). That’s let us split the costs of lawyer retainers, housing security, etc as she rebuilds her life.

She’s got a legal fight coming to a conclusion in the next few months [details redacted, about child support and taxes], and covering the fight plus some of the rebuilding is a little hard for our group to handle. We have a gap of about $1200 total over four months.

If you’re an Other Feminisms reader, and you’d like to chip in, you can email me with any questions, and my venmo is @leah-libresco. We’ve also gotten help from the Order of Judith, to whom I’m very grateful.

On average, women fleeing abuse return to their partners many times before they successfully escape. Being able to remove some of the financial pressure has made it easier for K to build a new, safe life.

Last month, I flew to California to sit down with Lila Rose of LiveAction. We had a broad ranging conversation—definitely a lot in here about The Dignity of Dependence—but also a little more about my conversion story and my family’s history of losing children through miscarriage. Plus, my take on rising misogyny on the Right (everything from saying women should be excluded from student loans to half-joking cries to repeal the 19th Amendment).

The video link is below (they went through several SEO driven titles, and very obviously I didn’t pick this one!) and you can also listen on Spotify and other podcast providers.

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I’ve really enjoyed being tagged in some people’s notes when they’re reading The Dignity of Dependence post-partum, and it was a delight on one book tour shop to have a mom show me her son’s inscription in the copy of The Dignity of Dependence that he bought for her.

So, as Mother’s Day approaches, I’d like to offer readers a little something extra if you’re thinking of getting a book for a friend or family member in April or May. This is NOT limited to moms—the book’s discussion of how our bodily frailty connects us to others certainly is not.

I’m planning to get the design below printed as either stickers or magnets, which I’d put in the mail to anyone who sends me a receipt for The Dignity of Dependence (or my other two books, Arriving at Amen and Building the Benedict Option) in April or May. I’ll have a copy to buy directly from me, if you’d like one signed.

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So, first off, would you prefer to see this printed as a sticker or a magnet?

I’ve got some magnet proofs on their way to my house, because I want a magnet, but stickers are a little more cost effective. Hold onto your receipts if you have them, and I’ll have a sign up form soon!

Who in your life have you lent your book to already?

What’s the best book someone recommended to you during a time of extended recovery?

I definitely nominate Piranesi for that second category.

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