To love another person is to see the face of God
A Conversation with Leah Libresco
In episode 3 of season 4, we sat down with Leah Libresco to discuss her conversion to Christianity, her employment at FiveThirtyEight, and her vision of human flourishing. To hear the episode, head to our website or listen on iTunes or Google Play.
Zac: We’re here with our guest for this episode, Leah Libresco. Leah is a blogger at the Patheos blog Unequally Yoked, and is a writer at FiveThirtyEight. Leah, welcome to the show!
Leah: Thanks for having me on!
Z: Definitely. I really want to get into all of the exciting projects you’re working on right now, but before we do that, I want to talk about the blog that you’ve been writing for years. Unequally Yoked is a Catholic blog and you are writing from a Catholic perspective, but you used to be an outspoken atheist and in 2012 announced that you were becoming a Christian. What prompted that change?
L: I actually blogged for Patheos on their Atheism Channel and had to send an email telling them I was not going to be able to do so anymore.
Z: Was that awkward?
L: Well it was kind of a weird email because before I told my distant friends I had to ask Patheos, “Can you move my blog? Has this happened before to you guys?” I started as an atheist and grew up as an atheist. There are lots of different kinds of atheists, and I was the type who believed very strongly in objective morality — the idea that there is real good and real bad that is not something we make up and is not something that is wholly culturally dependent. It is instead something more like mathematics, which exists outside of us and about which we can inquire but we cannot change. When I went to college I met Christians who were smart and interesting, and I started arguing with them. After borrowing lots of books and having late night debates, I started to notice that although I was really sure that morality was objective, I had trouble with the harder bits of philosophy that explained where it came from and how we came to know it. Over the course of four or five years of arguments, that was really the thing that ultimately did me in as an atheist.
Z: So that highlighted for you why you could not be an atheist, but why did you land on Christianity?
L: I started at the point of thinking that Christianity was just plain silly — that there were no people who cared about evidence that were actually Christian. The more I was discussing these things, the more I read people like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, and read various histories of Christ and the Bible, the more I looked at Christianity and said, “I don’t believe this, but I think a reasonable person could, and I think it would work from the inside.” Sometimes when you read science or fantasy fiction — like Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings — you just say, “I don’t believe in this world.” That’s how I felt about Christianity.
Z: So you recognized an internal consistency at least?
L: Exactly! If I had walked through a magic mirror and somebody said, “Leah, you’re in the magic universe where Christianity is true,” I would have said, “Ok. I know how to exist here. This will work.” I just didn’t think I lived in that universe.
Z: So what convinced you that this universe actually is real?
L: It was really when I started pushing hard on that question of how it is that we come to know morality. Because something like math is so concrete, you don’t find many people (with exceptions, of course) walking around and saying, “Mathematics! What can explain our knowledge of it?” For math it is easier to see how you can get from the world around you and take Plato’s way out — I have two feet and I have two brothers, and feet aren’t really like brothers but they have a quality of twoness, so now I know what two is, and you can build from there to number theory everything else. Easy, right? But morality is so much harder. You can’t look around and say, “I see someone kicking a puppy, and I see someone defrauding an old lady, and I notice that each of these participate in the form of injustice.” You can try, but people will reasonably say, “Really? You do?” It isn’t obvious enough that you can claim these truths in that way. My problem was that I had knowledge of this transcendent good without having the power in myself to come to know it.
I was having this conversation with a friend of mine going over exactly what I’ve told you. He said, “Ok, so that’s what you don’t believe. Got it. That’s clear. But what could work?” And I said, “I don’t know. That’s my problem.” He pressed me and said, “Just try and come up with something new. Don’t repeat the things you don’t believe.” I blurted out, “Well I don’t know, I guess morality just loves me or something.” It turns out that it does — and it is God! If I felt that I had knowledge of the good but no way to know it myself under my own power, it meant that the knowledge came from outside of me, and it was as if goodness itself was offering itself to me. You’re not talking about a rulebook, but an agent or person. Once you are talking about goodness offering itself out of love, you are definitely talking about God.
Z: Yea, so you’re definitely talking about God, and specifically about a benevolent God (so we’ve moved from atheism to a benevolent deism), but why are you talking about the God of Christianity?
L: Well at this point I had really been steeped in ideas about Christianity, so a lot of it was really like stepping through the “mirror” that I mentioned earlier into this alternate world that I had come to believe worked, and here was God.
Z: So you just stepped through in faith and the lights came on?
L: Well I really didn’t step through at all. I noticed the place where I already was more than anything else.
Sally: Has your conversion been well received by your blogging audience? Did you lose one audience and gain another?
L: There’s a mix. Some people are still complaining after several years and stick around to do so. But for people who have been reading my blog the whole time, they’ve seen me wrestling with these questions for a while. These folks have said, in essence, “I disagree with your conclusions but I can see how you got there, I just think that you went wrong six steps back.”
Z: So they were at least recognizing the same internal coherence that you had seen six steps back…
L: Exactly. Which I actually found reassuring, that no one thought I was crazy. They just thought that I had a premise wrong somewhere.
Z: Well, speaking of premises, I have to ask about your work at FiveThirtyEight. This is one of the newest entrants in the “data journalism” craze, owned by ESPN but started by Nate Silver, the wunderkind statistician formerly of the New York Times. The site is rooted in a very quantitative, empirical epistemology, but you’ve talked about how you came around to a decidedly non-empirical approach to epistemology. How do you square the two while working as a writer at FiveThirtyEight?
L: Well, I think you shouldn’t forget that the way I came to know God was by going, “God!” Kind of a bit like a mathematical revelation, I suppose. I feel lucky in my conversion in that God reached out to me along the beauty I knew and trusted most. It is by being rooted in the beauty of mathematics and the beauty of ways to interpret the world around us that I also wound up at FiveThirtyEight. And people forget that it is always statisticians who are most aware of the limits of what statistics can tell us. It is statisticians who run after you, tugging at your sleeve, yelling “don’t overinterpret my results — they’ll only take you so far!” And I see that a lot in my coworkers and in the articles I write. We can’t explain the whole world to you but we can explain why the world is hard to explain. It’s sometimes frustrating when you get to the point that you realize that you don’t have any strong conclusion at all — that the point of your story is how messy the problem is and how people have fumbled around with it. But it is a way of exploring the world, and like any lens you can hold up, it will reveal both the world and the limits of the lens itself.
Z: I am inherently skeptical of data journalism because it privileges one way of telling stories over another, overlooking aesthetics and the narrative form and trading in those things for numbers. I take your point that numbers can be beautiful in and of themselves, but I think they are more so when they are not in isolation.
L: Yea, I mean, anything where you have applied math — where you aren’t going to trust that people just want number theory — the numbers are only interesting because they are about something. If you don’t convey the stories that the numbers reveal then we’ve fallen in our job as data journalists. But I have some really great coworkers who do a good job of showing you what the numbers can do and reminding you what the numbers are about.
Z: I’ve seen that in FiveThirtyEight. They are good at pointing out the limitations of statistics that measure a player’s efficiency or wins above replacement or whatever the case is. But these articles also give ammo to people on any side of a debate regarding whether or not player A is the greatest of all time or whether or not player B is a deserving MVP, etc.
L: That’s kind of funny because especially in sports, all debates about sports really wind up being debates about what we value in the sport. You see it in gymnastics and ice skating now, where there is controversy over whether what you want are long, lithe, delicate people who have these beautiful lines and this balletic look, or stockier, muscly people who can do unbelievable flips but do them in a starker way. For that, there is no objective gymnastics, but it comes down to what you value about gymnastics. What kind of beauty do you want to see reflected there?
Z: I think a great example of this is the ongoing debate about who the greatest quarterback of all time is. Do you look at total touchdowns? Passing yards? TD-INT ratios? Super Bowl wins? Playoff wins? There are a thousand ways that you can crumble the cookie.
L: Now you’re out of my depth, because I may work at ESPN, but the sport I follow most closely is roller derby!
S: Well let’s go back to a topic you are more familiar with — atheism. What do you think of new atheism? We hear about it a lot from its proponents — most notably Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Where do you think new atheism goes wrong? And can you summarize it for our listeners?
L: I think new atheism goes wrong in that it is all written from an attitude of besiegement. It is aggressive, provocative, and trying to clear from space more than it is trying to do anything else. A lot of new atheists will admit to this, wanting to make atheism thinkable, and give people knowledge that will stand up for them. To do that, it often means going after “lowest common denominator Christianity,” because they’re just trying to show that Christianity isn’t so tough, that it’s alright to be atheist, that other people will support you, and that those people are also striking out against real problems. An atheist who is pushing back against someone who doesn’t think that evolution should be taught in public school doesn’t really have time for the niceties of, “Yes, but what is the physical grounding of morals without a deity?” They’re trying to deal with something that is a problem right in front of their problem that impinges on their daily life.
The metaphysical problems that eventually led me to where I am normally don’t pinch you day to day like these problems do. So I think a lot of new atheism is reacting to more immediate problems — which are very real — and trying to carve out a little bit of breathing room before returning to larger questions. Now, I think the biggest flaw is that sometimes you’ll find new atheists (not all of them) who do clear out that breathing room but then do not make the most of it. They need to ask, “Alright. Now we have room to be atheists. What do we believe and how do we know it?” I think there is an almost exilic feel to a lot of new atheism, where these are people on the march and trying to find a place to rest. Until they feel safe to do that, they don’t have time for the questions that as Christians would give us more purchase for evangelization.
Z: It sounds like you are saying that the new atheists are defensive and because of that they overlook wrestling with the actual substantive questions and don’t engage with the serious arguments of Christianity.
L: And I think sometimes that’s not the wrong choice from their perspective. I think that some people are defensive reflexively, holding onto a pattern of defensiveness that is no longer necessary, but some people are in the position in which other people dislike them for being atheists, or it is making it hard for them to hold a job, and in these cases the defensiveness is responding to a real threat.
Z: You already mentioned C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. Who else would you put in your list of favorite authors or serious intellectual influences?
L: Definitely Alasdair MacIntyre. While I was exploring this whole question of what morality is and where it comes from, I kept looking for books that I could hand to my Christian friends while they were handing me Lewis an Chesterton. I ready MacIntyre’s After Virtue and thought, “This! This is it! This summarizes everything I thought was true, but goes beyond it. It is perfect!”
Z: Oops!
L: I know! He converted to Catholicism after writing the book, and I was so ticked off at him at the time. Now I understand, but then I thought, “you traitor! I needed you!” I also think this is going to sound funny as an intellectual influence, but a lot of what made Christianity real and plausible to me was the mix of both the intellectual — Lewis, Chesterton, MacIntyre, Feser’s gloss on Aquinas — and Catholic mommy blogs, which helped me to see Christianity on the scale of a human life. I saw how the faith was helping to shape these women’s lives and choices over small things: how they dealt with the neighbor’s kids who kept coming over when they were tired of them, small choices they were making in their marriage, etc. These stories connected the high of the metaphysics with the everyday of the small choices that did not rise to the level of, “will I be martyred by the Romans or not?”
Z: I love that. We’ve talked a lot on this podcast before about the value of the home and what you do in the home as a parent. It’s really neat to hear that you were shaped by these very heady philosophers but also these very faithful women who are doing an often overlooked but very difficult task of being a mom.
L: Absolutely. I think it is always a good error check on your philosophy or your theology to look at what it is like to live it. If you’re not making the time to live it yourself because you’re off in an ivory tower or buried in your books (I’m prone to both of those), it’s important that you at least take a good look and hear the testimony of people who are living the thing you think you’re preaching, and make sure you recognize it.
S: Can you tell us more about your book, Arriving at Amen?
L: This was a book that I wrote after my conversion, because as I kind of mentioned, my conversion was really intellectually rooted, and I didn’t have any experience of being a Christian myself. I had to make the transition from thinking about God to thinking with God, which is what prayer is. So in Arriving at Amen, I’m taking readers through my conversion of the heart where I needed to learn how to spend time with God and who God was aside from a series of intellectual propositions. And what I feel blessed about is that this was all hard for me! The intellectual part was easy for me, and God had to keep inviting me in by using other sources of beauty (in the same way that math helped me find God) in order to be able to catch sight of Him and be able to receive His love and offer my own.
In one example, when I was praying the rosary, I got a little stuck on the repetition of it. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing the whole time. I knew I was supposed to be meditating, but was I meditating well? Was I meditating enough? A lot of the time, I found that my rosaries were just me thinking about praying the rosary, and weren’t really me spending time with God, at least as far as I could tell. And the thing that helped me through getting stuck there and feeling alone in prayer was the very secular pursuit of taking ballroom dance classes. There is a lot of repetition in dance, and most of the time what you are practicing is not the dips or anything you think of as fancy, but just the basics — 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, of the waltz. You’re trying to get the rhythm into your bones, so that when your partner moves you, you can move easily and naturally in response to a cue. I looked back at this very repetitive prayer — “Hail Mary, full of grace, etc.” — and thought, “maybe I’m being invited to a basic, just like in dance. Maybe my job isn’t to do the dips on my own or the lifts on my own but just to be with God here and get the rhythm of being with God into my bones, so that when He moves me, I can respond.”
S: That’s a really beautiful and helpful analogy. I think prayer — especially repetitive prayer — is something that is hard for a lot of people to accept and understand and appreciate.
L: I think for a lot of humble things, we just have trouble in the moment appreciating that we are really blessed by the fruits of small, humble work.
S: At Vernacular, we focus a lot on what it means to pursue human flourishing. What do you think it means to live a flourishing human life?
L: I think it starts with love. It starts with looking at the world and other people through God’s eyes, and recognizing that is the gaze that you are adopting. One thing I like to do sometimes when I am praying and walking places is to pause and look at each person who passes me and to think about the way God looks at them. And I don’t have a sustained relationship with each person in the moment, but it’s amazing how beautiful people are if you just pause and look at each one of them. I know it’s the kind of thing that sounds corny and earnest, but I guess that a lot of a flourishing human life is corny and earnest — that the world is ripe with beauty, ripe with joy, and there is a lot of time where we are just trying to catch a glimpse of everything through God’s eyes. Even things that are difficult or friends who are stuck that we can see when people are having a difficult time how beautiful they are and how much we want them to be free of what is oppressing them, because of how lovely it will be when they are unfurled in their full glory and are what God wants them to be. That helps me in difficult times — thinking that I am saddened by a situation because I know what it could be and it is falling short or I know what I could be and I’m falling short, and instead of just thinking about how limited I am right now, thinking about how frustrated I am with those limits points me towards what we are all called to be.
S: It reminds me of the line from Les Misérables— “to love another person is to see the face of God.” I’ve always loved that line.
L: Absolutely. And I think the reason that is flourishing is that we are existing in the world. We flourish in it because we exist in it and know it as it is. All that beauty is what the world is. It’s not wearing rose colored glasses. It’s taking off our gray ones. It is flourishing both because it is joyful and because it is truthful.
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