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On Kneeling: A Response to Cardinal Cupich

Leah Libresco Sargeant

Putting “O Holy Night” on the program at Christmas Masses in Chicago this year may prove a little awkward. Cardinal Blase J. Cupich’s recent message to his diocese, entitled...

How to Fix Our Broken Dating Culture

Leah Libresco Sargeant

America is missing children because it’s missing marriages. However, fixing our fertility gap won’t happen by pressuring or humiliating singles. It requires fixing the broken dating cultures that are...

The Defrocking of Father AI

Leah Libresco Sargeant

Father Justin was rightly defrocked within two days of his public debut. “Father Justin” was the name given to the AI-powered chatbot recently launched by Catholic Answers as an...

Free the Children

Leah Libresco Sargeant

Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be by timothy p. carney harper, 368 pages, $29.99 The Anxious Generation: How the Great...

Punished for Getting Married

Leah Libresco Sargeant

In traditional marriage vows, husband and wife promise to care for each other “in sickness and in health, till death do us part.” But when one or both of...

When Feast and Fast Collide

Leah Libresco Sargeant

You don’t want me to cut your toast with a little heart cookie cutter, do you?” I ask. As expected, my husband declines. It’s a little strange to plan...

Cheating with ChatGPT

Leah Libresco Sargeant

ChatGPT has schools playing defense. This artificial-intelligence language bot was developed by OpenAI (“GPT” stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”). Microsoft, Google, and other Big Tech companies are developing their...

Muddy Morals in The Rings of Power

Leah Libresco Sargeant

This review contains spoilers for The Rings of Power. When my brother was young, my mother read The Lord of the Rings aloud to him. He loved the tale...

In America, but Not of America

Leah Libresco Sargeant

American Shtetl:The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New Yorkby nomi m. stolzenberg and david n. myersprinceton, 496 pages, $35 The sign at the border of...

Encanto and the Benedict Option

Leah Libresco Sargeant

Encanto, the newest Disney animated musical, was released as Omicron spiked and many families hunkered down for a quiet, isolated Christmas. The magical Madrigal family at the heart of...

The Wasted Potential of Wonder Woman 1984

Leah Libresco Sargeant

Superheroes are aspirational figures. They’re faster and stronger than the rest of us, and although their powers put them beyond certain limits (like gravity), they’re firmly bound by a...

Bad Art Warps Our Vision

Leah Libresco Sargeant

I haven’t listened to “WAP,” the obscene song with the unprintable full title that’s topping the summer charts, and I don’t plan to. I take warnings about bad art...

Discernment in Plague-Times

Leah Libresco Sargeant

For some time, whenever I recommended Kristin Lavransdatter to friends I kept forgetting about the plague. I first read Sigrid Undset’s novel—a three-volume story of one woman’s life in...

Fear and the Benedict Option

Leah Libresco Sargeant

When people ask me if the Benedict Option is a call to hospitality or to hunker down, I tell them it’s both, at different times. As one friend of...

Standard Procedures

Leah Libresco Sargeant

I am standing in the waiting room of the ultrasound clinic, speaking with my doctor on the phone. She is telling me that I need to walk out of...