LLS: They have chanted prayers in the middle of the night and they’re praying for people who are awake and alone in that moment. Now, if you don’t believe that that’s doing anything, then that’s kind of a waste of their sleep and a fantasy that they’re helping someone. And if you do believe in the economy of grace, then they’re very much active in the world by being secluded. They are standing alongside someone who is—one of them give the example of just someone who’s thinking of committing a crime in the late part of the night, who is dedicating his prayer for them not knowing their name. So they’re very plugged into the world, but in this hidden economy of grace, if that’s false, then they aren’t. If it’s true, then they are. And that’s where that computer programmer precision comes back in, right? Because you’re right, it’s not a good use of a life to spend that much time in contemplative prayer if there isn’t contemplative prayer in a meaningful sense.

MO: I’m enough of a romantic and an aesthete to believe it’s beautiful regardless.

LLS: No, it isn’t. No it isn’t. It’s disgusting.

MO: That’s the computer programmer about you. But I actually think it is.

LLS: It’s the truth teller in me.

MO: See, it’s so funny. You’re like one tick removed from the atheist you used to be. It’s so funny.

LLS: I’m the same person. I’m the same person.

MO: You’re the same person.

LLS: I updated my model of the world.

MO: Right? Different software, different inputs.

Hey, friends, and welcome back to Arc: The Podcast. It’s been a couple of weeks and I’m super excited to be back with you. I’m Mark Oppenheimer. I am the editor of Arc Magazine online at arcmag.org. That’s A-R-C-M-A g.org. And I teach at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. But here at the podcast, the sidekick podcast to Arc Magazine, we interview interesting figures, often religious figures, often people who are just mixing it up in the public debate, often people I just find really fascinating myself, and Leah Libresco Sargeant is all of the above. She’s interesting. She’s funny, she’s fun to talk to. She’s somebody I’ve been following from afar for a long time. She is a former atheist, convert to Catholicism, feminist, generally conservative, but also liberal in some areas, sort of politically unpredictable.

I mean, sort of all you need to know is that she’s obsessed with math, used to work in rationalism and effective altruism, was a hardcore atheist, sort of computational logic atheist type who then flipped to the Catholic church, except she would say it was no flip at all. She would say that she’s the same person, but just has a different model of the world now and is applying the same kind of thoughtful, strict rationalism and logic, but now through a Catholic perspective. So it’s all very interesting. And her new book, “The Dignity of Dependence,” which is about women and motherhood and feminism and how to fit women into a world designed for men is very provocative in the best possible way. I want to get to that interview really, really quickly.

But first I just want to tell a little story about the kind of interview that works really well and the kind that doesn’t. About 10 years ago I was hosting the podcast Unorthodox about Jewish life and culture. It was produced by Tablet Magazine. And one of our early guests, so this may even have been 15 years ago, was a columnist for a major web magazine that a lot of you have heard of. This person came on the show and had recently published a book, I think, or had somehow made a splash in some way. And I jokingly said, “Wow, your income bracket must have shot way up,” which is a kind of cheeky thing to say. But I often will ask guests how they make a living and about their income because I do think it’s one of the things that people want to know. People want to know, okay, you’re a writer, you’re a poet. Well, you’re not supporting your family as a poet, so what’s your day job and how do you make a living?

And sometimes I’ll even say, “What do you get paid?” which I know is taken to be rude in polite society, but I actually think that we need to talk more about money in class and those things. So I tend to ask it. And so I said something like, “Wow, your income bracket must have shot up. Are you getting a new car, or something?” A little bit jokey. But also I really was asking about this guest’s income bracket, and the guest sort of begged off, didn’t really answer the question deflected, which is fine. And I let them off the hook. And then my boss at Tablet Magazine, the editor-in-chief, got an email from this guest a day or two later complaining about the extraordinarily offensive and aggressive questioning and saying, this is not why I come on podcast. I don’t expect to be confronted with difficult questions like this. Basically saying, I go on to be asked questions to promote my book, but I don’t want anyone to ask me anything that throws me off at all.

I just have always remembered that guest who instead of just hearing the question responding or in this case refusing to respond, which was fine, and moving on with good humor was so offended that I hadn’t made it a typical puff piece, a typical celebrity interview where you just ask the questions they want to be asked. And to my mind, that’s the worst possible guest, right? The one who doesn’t want to be thrown off, the one who wants to be kept in their comfort zone. It’s understandable, but it doesn’t make for a great guest. And then you have Leah Libresco Sargeant, my guest this week, whom I pushed and pulled and prodded at and really mixed it up with.

We have a lot of disagreements and just loved it. And in fact, you’ll hear says at one point, I like that you did the reading and that you have real questions as opposed to just what do you think about this? And what do you think about that? I want to thank her for that. And I know that people have different levels of toleration for fighting on podcasts. She and I are not fighting. It’s totally good natured, but I know that some people want to hear the sort of predictable puff piece, easy interview, softball questions. And then I think most people don’t. And I’m just always so gratified when you get a guest like Leah, who in part because of her background in philosophy, in high school and college debate, in taking controversial positions, and in trying to persuade people out there in the world is modeling a kind of willingness to engage and to argue and quarrel that I think we all need to have more of. And I think you hear the benefits of that. I think you as the listener, reap the fruits of that in this interview that I’m about to play.

So Leah Libresco Sargeant, author of the new book, “The Dignity of Dependence.” It’s my great pleasure to play this interview for you now.

Leah Libresco Sargeant, thanks so much for joining me today.

LLS: Thanks for having me on.

MO: So before we get into this book, “The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto,” which I read avidly and quickly and hungrily, and not just because it was blessedly brief, but because it’s really compelling. I mean, I was deep in.

I’m trying to remember when we met, I think we were on a radio show in Hartford together. It was Colin McEnroe’s radio show at WNPR in Hartford. And was it about presidential debates? Did they have me on as a past debater and you as a current debater?

LLS: That’s right. Yep.

MO: And so I’m trying to figure out if that’s the case, how I knew that you were weren’t just an atheist. You were an active atheist.

LLS: That’s right. I was an atheist writer. I managed to place fourth on a list of atheist bloggers. So I think that was partly because one atheist blogger won every single year, so relatively few people entered at that point, which left a narrow opening for me.

MO: Was that Hemant Mehta? I feel like—

LLS: No, it was P.Z. Myers.

MO: Oh yeah. Okay. Also still big, I think as far as I know, right? A biologist out of Minnesota. God, that feels like another time when there were a lot of notable public atheist vying for atheist space in the blogosphere.

LLS: They had a schism, so…

MO: Oh, that’s interesting. Okay, so now we’re going to go on our first tangent and then we’re going to circle back to your book. We’re going to circle back to your conversion like Catholicism, motherhood, doulas, “The Dignity of Dependence.” What do you mean they had a schism? I last I was deeply covering—I was deep into the atheist movement as a journalist covering it ten, twelve, fifteen years ago when it was kind of at its height. I totally have tuned it out since. What do you mean they had a schism? Teach me.

LLS: I think it was a fruitful schism, so I’d have to look up how far back this was, but it was a schism between wings that one of which kind of took the name Atheism Plus and the precipitating incident was one of those really minor, enormous internet blowups, but over a minor thing about was it wrong for a guy at an atheist conference to follow a female speaker into an elevator and proposition her there once the door had closed, rather than approach her literally anywhere else where she wasn’t stuck in an enclosed space with him, as is often the case with the internet and gender. This question of etiquette and courtesy and morals became a firestorm with a lot of and death threats.

But what I think it was pointing at, which was fruitful and gave rise to the bigger split is, even when I was an atheist, I was always like, okay, atheism is about what we’re trying to get people to stop believing. But you can’t have a full vivid human life by just saying, I am an atheist. That’s a negative statement. You have to say, I’m an atheist who is a consequentialist, who cares about shrimp welfare. I’m an atheist who’s a virtue ethicist, who cares about marriage. And so what happened was the atheist got enough breathing room that they had space to talk to each other about what their positive visions are, and they found out that one, they disagreed. And two, they didn’t actually have the philosophical groundwork to figure out how to navigate those disagreements besides accusing other people of being in bad faith. And then there was a blow up.

MO: And the Atheist Plus people, they were interested. I mean, broadly speaking, it’s now coming back to me a little bit, they were interested, I would say both in a positive…maybe I’m wrong about this, I think they were interested both in a positive vision of what the good looks like, but also were they the ones who were also more interested in social justice movements, in other words—

LLS: Exactly. Yes.

MO: They wanted to expand atheism beyond just the question of stamping out belief in God.

LLS: Correct. I think the opposing side didn’t have as much of a coherent side of, “No, you’re wrong about what the good life consists of. It’s this.” It was more of a “What are we doing talking about this? We’re outward focused and you guys are creating internal divisions by talking about what the good life consists of.”

MO: And then there were also always adjacent to that, and these are the people who interested me the most and whom I liked the most, the scientific skeptics who were saying, look, vaccines work, creationism is not young Earth creationism is fault. They were the ones saying when someone reports back to you, they were abducted by aliens, have a healthy dose of skepticism, and chiropractors make some chiropractors make some bunk claims. That whole worldview of saying, “Go to the doctor.”

LLS: I feel like that baton was taken up by Emily Oster without it being as focused on atheism.

MO: Yeah, and it’s interesting, we’ll get into this in your book a little bit. I mean, it’s interesting because as a kind of person who is both religious but also a scientific skeptic, in other words, I don’t want my metaphysics to crowd out my going to the doctor, and I don’t think it has to. I was interested as we tiptoed up to some of these things in your book when you started talking about childbirth, which can get very mystical and woo woo for some people, I was intrigued to see your positivity toward doulas because a lot of people in the traditional religion world, or shall I say, your typical conservative is probably doula skeptic in skeptical in some way.

LLS: Really?

MO: Well, it—

LLS: It depends which wing of conservatism you’re talking to, right? The crunchy cons are very pro-doula.

MO: Right. Well, and we’ll get to that in some ways, you are rehabilitating the world. Rod Dreher is left behind, which is the crunchy cons.

LLS: Second time I’m doing that. Yeah.

MO: Which I think is you in about twenty other people. I mean, what was so interesting was it turned out there weren’t really crunchy cons if it meant collectivism, higher taxes, labor rights, it turned out that actually market trumps all for most people who I think had a crunchy con identity. But we can circle back to that. You can defend the vibrancy of the crunchy con community as you know it.

Before we get there. Right. So I knew you a little bit when you were an undergraduate, then you graduated into the world of atheist bloggers, and then one day I wake up from the birth of my second, or third child, and reengage the world outside, that as it were, start reading stuff again and discover you’ve become a Roman Catholic. Can you tell us about that journey? How did you become a Catholic?

LLS: I’ll give the brief summary because some people got the four hour summary.

MO: Could I have the seven minute summary, the four to seven minute summary?

LLS: Let me do my best. Alright, so from the beginning as an atheist, I always had positive beliefs as well as negative beliefs as an atheist. I think one of the strongest ones is that morality is something real in the world, something outside ourselves. It’s less controversially. It’s something like mathematics, which usually as an atheist people didn’t give me a hard time for. How can you be an atheist and believe in mathematics? But similarly, we try and understand laws. We didn’t write and try and see, okay, well where are we confident? Where are we trying to extend and test? Whether as I make this new assertion, is it true? And in both these cases, we’re exploring something that we uncover, like archeologists, not something we build like architects.

And so for me, coming to college trying to talk my religious friends out of being religious, I was never just trying to say, “Stop going to church.” I was always trying to present, “What am I inviting you into?” And when I arrived in college, that philosophical vision was a mix of deontology and stoicism, which for you’re not maximally nerdy listeners, that was a focus on two things. Stoicism is just very interested descriptively in what do I have control over in my life? And what I don’t have control over, I should relinquish my emotional attachment to it. I can choose when I leave the house whether or not to bring an umbrella, but once I’m out, if I didn’t and it’s raining on me, adding frustration does not make me any drier. So that kind of little filtering of the world of where do I actually have the power to act and where should I just receive the world as it is and not layer on additional frustration where it serves me, zilch.

MO: Many people in either the therapeutic and/or Buddhist worlds would talk about radical acceptance. That would be the term I would say these days, what I’m hearing, the way I would repackage that to my children is radical acceptance.

LLS: Radical acceptance is a little more positively valenced.

MO: Okay.

LLS: I think if I see something heavy, fall on someone and crush them, I don’t have to radically accept that. But I might go, well, look, I am sad for them, but acknowledging that from the moment I spotted it, I was 300 feet away. I could not have gotten there in time. So I’m not going to keep myself up at night with what should I have done differently. Factually, I was too far away. So I think it’s a little quieter than that versus the embracing everything with loving kindness stuff.

MO: Right, right.

LLS: And then deontology is this sense of how do we make sense of the moral rules of the world? And deontology, poor Kant has written very long books on this. I’m going to make a very short thing. He’s interested, one of its fundamental things that there are rules to follow. And one of the ways you can think about what those rules are is you can’t do anything you wouldn’t will as a universal law. And I think the way I’d summarize this with one nice vivid example people come back to is there’s lots of ways we want to make an exception just for me. And these are kind of self annihilating, moral maxims. If I want to lie to you, I can only lie to you because I live in a world where mostly people tell the truth. I’m free riding on other people telling the truth.

You’re not allowed to do that in deontology. And as you might expect for being the kind of person who’s into deontology and stoicism in high school, stoicism particularly is very great for being that kind of high schooler because I was not very popular. And so all the time, deontology is really focused on duty also, not sentiment. So when I’m going through my life as a weirdo high schooler, I can think, well, how should I respond to this person who’s being kind of a jerk to me? And I go, wow, this is an opportunity for moral excellence because now I’m being kind to you solely out of duty and not out of sentiment because you’re a jerk to me. But luckily that means my kindness is all the more praiseworthy.

MO: And because you would universalize kindness as a rule, not jerkiness.

LLS: Yes, yes, exactly.

MO: So you’re always thinking, what would I have? What’s the thing I could do that I would have everyone do? And kindness obviously wins even if that person in that moment deserves a punch in the face.

LLS: Or is not reciprocating. Deserves is a big moral question, but I’ll leave that there.

And so then in college, I’m pitching people on this, but I’m finding I’m running into some parts that don’t work as well as I try and apply them. I don’t want to put a Immanuel Kant to blame here, but the problem with my approach to deontology is I relished being nice to people who were jerks too much. I loved being good in the ways that were hardest and was suspicious of the idea that being good could be easy. And I found that wasn’t as universal. My approach to deontology didn’t fit deontology very well because—there was one moment where it got into what was a debate fight about whether freshmen should be allowed to speak at our prize debate, and whether speaking time should be cut by an additional 30 seconds. That was, as you know as a debater, you won’t be surprised to hear this immediately devolved into slurs, swearing, et cetera. Someone called me a whore again about speaking times.

MO: I’m so sorry, God.

LLS: There was no part of this metaphor that worked. And so my boyfriend at the time, who was Catholic, was like, “Well, I’m going to pray for that person.” And I’m like, “Well, why would you do that?” And he’s like, “Well, because she said that to you.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but even from a religious point of view, why would you say: dear Lord, Leah is finding it too hard to be nice to someone who’s being mean to her, so please make them nicer so she doesn’t have to be a good person.” And he’s like, “That’s really not the prayer I’m going to say.”

And I realized during that discussion, I didn’t really want other people to be nice to me. I wasn’t willing that I was excited about this situation. And this got me interested ultimately in virtue ethics, which has—if you think of deontology, where the most moral person in the world is someone walking diagonal into a snowstorm, everything in the world is going against you, but you’re holding onto duty so hard that every fiber of your being is straining against the headwinds. Virtue ethics is more of the point of view that morality should be something you do in a graceful way, that it’s fully integrated into your being. And you look more like a ballet dancer crossing a room than someone who’s not doing anything hard, but the integration of her body means that even that small act is beautiful.

I switched to virtue ethics, but more problems about how you come to understand the moral law. Deontology lets you do it more through logic is this universal realizable and virtual ethics is teleological. You’re pointed at well do what the good person does in this situation. Well, you’re like, okay, well shoot. Well, how do I know what the good person does if I’m not using axioms and checking if things are universalizable. And then that’s the end of the story. And ultimately, I didn’t have a very satisfactory path to how is it that I am finite and have knowledge of transcendent moral law and there’s no God, and after a number of fights and explorations, the premise I was least confident of was that last one. So I threw it out and became a Catholic.

MO: I remember, and I might misremember, so you’ll tell me if I’m getting this wrong, that you wrote something that indicated that the reason you became a Catholic as opposed to other kinds of deists was that, again, this is me possibly misremembering through what’s got to be over a decade now, 15 years maybe, was that the reason you became a Catholic as opposed to some kind of other deist was that it made sense to you that if there was a God who was going to reveal laws to man, he would do it by becoming a human.

Do I remember correctly?

LLS: It was less that. I built that all out as a chain and more that in having these fights over time, I felt like Catholicism was coherent but not true. I thought it all worked like a clockwork mechanism. It fit together, but it was not on. And once I came to believe in God having this coherent account of God that just depended on him existing, it felt like switching the mechanism on.

MO: Interesting. Do you think that if you had had a different history…your father’s Jewish, your mother’s—

LLS: My mom, so halachically, yes.

MO: Your mom’s Jewish and your father was ancestrally, what?

LLS: Catholic.

MO: Catholic. Do you think you could have ended up a Jew?

LLS: I don’t know. In some sense, controversially, I have in that growing up, I never believed the Torah was true. Right. And now I do believe it’s true. I just also think there is an additional thing God did.

MO: I guess I’m asking, do you think that it was Providence that led you to Catholicism and that that was in some sense inevitable that God willed that for you? Or do you think there’s a version of your personal history that was contingent that would’ve led you to go deeper into Jewish Torah and made you connect with Judaism? I’m asking this obviously as an entirely interested party. I wonder how do we lose smart people to this heresy?

LLS: I think there are always different possible paths, but what I hope is that I believe this because it’s true.

MO: Do you know enough about Judaism to be confident that it’s inadequate?

LLS: I don’t think it’s inadequate. I think it’s the first part of a story that continued.

MO: Could you learn anything that would lead you to realize that your Catholicism has been a heresy and that you’re a Jew?

LLS: I think there could be historical examinations of the Gospels, et cetera, that would point to that. And other questions I have about the history of rabbinic Jewish practice after the destruction of the Temple, but they don’t feel like the uppermost questions on my mind.

MO: You’re happy where you’ve landed? Why are you a Catholic and not say a Church of England Anglican, or a Lutheran?

LLS: So I do think the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church both have the strongest claims to having a real connection to the founding. And I think it’s very hard to look at the founding of the Church of England and think this is a real reformation, even though I think there were real good faith critiques of the Catholic Church that were occurring at that time. I think there’s lots of ways we see that the Catholic Cahurch has over time preserved the deposit of faith in a way a number of Protestant denominations have just shucked off.

I think there’s a pattern you’ll see, especially around the Eucharist, where you look at the church, the Catholic Church, holding onto what is both the historical and weirdest interpretation of this, that Christ does say, this is actually my body and I want you to eat it. It is much more a strange thing to come up with. And then you look at Protestant things like obviously, obviously he didn’t mean that, and he just kind of misspoke when he told people who were running away, yes, this is a hard teaching, but it wasn’t that hard and this is much smaller and more normal than you were worried. That does sound more like people watering down God rather than returning to their roots.

MO: Before we leave this behind, because I do want to get to your book and your evolution of your thoughts since your conversion, which, how long ago was it now? It was—

LLS: I was received to the Church in fall of 2012. So at this point I am—

MO: 13 years. You’re having your bat mitzvah.

LLS: Bat mitzvah, yeah. Driving is still a way aways.

MO: Not if my kids have their way.

Hey, it’s Mark again. I really hope you’re enjoying listening to this interview with Leah Libresco Sargeant. It’s absolutely one of my favorite podcast interviews I’ve done so far. If you are, I really hope you’ll go over to arc mag.org. That’s A-R-C-M-A-G.org because over at our website, at our main magazine, we have a profile of Leah that just got posted this week by Brad East who’s a theology professor at Abilene Christian University, in which he spends time talking to Leah, talking to people who know her, who have read her works. He traces her evolution from secular Jew to avowed atheist to devout Roman Catholic. It’s wonderful reading and it really fleshes out the person whom you’re hearing on this podcast. It gives you a fully well-rounded picture of who Leah Libresco Sargeant is. It’s a lovely compliment to this interview that I’m doing.

Also, I hope you’ll go to your favorite podcast platform and rate and review us and subscribe to the podcast and share it however best you can think of somebody curious about atheism, or Catholicism, or abortion, or any of the things that Leah writes about and send this link onto them. And now back to the rest of my interview with Leah Libresco Sargeant.

Are you of the kind of N.T. Wright school that this is all historically verifiable that a cool calm appraisal of the evidence would lead any thoughtful person sincerely seeking to realize obviously the Resurrection is true, that the evidence is on that side?

LLS: No, I think there is evidence, but it is a big claim. So it’s reasonable that people, even when there is strong historical evidence go, well, this is suggestive, but the claim is so big that even this documentation doesn’t get me over the hump even if I don’t know how to get over the hump myself.

I think something that’s really interesting is we tend to assume, looking back at history, we do know more than we do, even for figures like Julius Caesar who produced an enormous amount of evidentiary text, right? Lots of what we know about history is a little more fragile than we think looking back.

MO: I totally agree.

LLS: So I would not say if you just get deep in history, you have to believe in the resurrection. I think if you look deep in history, you’ll find things that are weird that could peak your curiosity, and there are people for whom that was enough to tip them over. But I don’t think someone is intellectually unserious if they look at and everything and don’t go, well, that’s it for me.

MO: Right. I totally agree. I mean, I say this as someone who was at a certain point was going to be a professional historian and that I’m actually sufficiently untrusting of historical archives. I think there’s so much we don’t know that we think we know that if anything it’s a bad reason. It makes it a worse reason, a proper understanding of history makes that a very bad reason to come to Christianity. I’m mystified by people who think, well, the evidence will get me there, partly because if the evidence can get you there, new evidence could not get you there, and I don’t think that’s what they really want.

LLS: But you still have to go with your best faith interpretation of what is true at any particular moment. You have to believe it if you do think it’s true. And if you do learn something that shifts you off, you should shift off. But you shouldn’t say, okay, the evidence led me here, but I’m going to ignore the evidence in case new evidence ever emerges.

MO: No, I just find the hunt for evidence as opposed to a, I mean, this just says something about my own anthropology, my who I am, right? To me, the kind of hunt for evidence for these things is just a silly enterprise that this is religious faith making claims that are millennia old, and ultimately you’re going to land in a religious tradition because it feels true on some kind of numinous unverifiable level. I’m mystified by the people who want the verifiability.

LLS: I think it’s worth inquiring of just like is this all historically defensible to believe. Because if it isn’t, you might want to get off the train right now. And I think Christianity does clear that bar and it’s valuable to know because if it didn’t, people should get off the train. I don’t think it’s historically compulsory to believe.

MO: So you might say to Latter Day Saints for example, it just doesn’t clear the bar. I’m just picking them just to pick them.

LLS: Yes.

MO: But part of the reason it doesn’t clear the bar is because it’s so recent. We know enough to know. It probably doesn’t clear the bar. I mean, the good luck of say Catholicism and Judaism, and to a lesser extent Islam, is they’re old enough that it’s easier for them to clear the bar, perhaps.

LLS: I think it is always easier to kind of wind up in a intermediate position about the far history, but again, we don’t take that whole approach to Roman history. We’re not like, well, we could be making some serious errors. There are bits where we’re like, we’re really not sure how many emperors there were during this range, but even there we’re like, okay, we’ve got a lower bound and upper bound we’re relatively confident in, so whenever we talk about the past, I think of that way.

We can set lower and upper bounds to our reasonable expectation about what happened. And then we can’t always speak as precisely any more than we can speak precisely about the present. I’m a journalist, so I’ve had those moments of, alright, I’m trying to figure out just exactly what happened here. Then I walk away going, I have not figured out my satisfaction, figured out what happened here yesterday to the level of clarity I need to file a story.

MO: Tell me about it. Okay, so 13 years ago you received into the Catholic Church and you’ve written since three books that feel substantially with Catholicism, though this one, you’re a little bit oblique about it and we’ll get to that. But you wrote—

LLS: It’s not that oblique, it says, “Catholic ideas for a secular world right on the inside cover.”

MO: Does it?

LLS: Yeah. Flip through.

MO: The Dignity of Dependence?

LLS: You got caught, my friend. Just flip one or two in where it names the series it’s published in.

MO: Oh, you mean, okay. It is, yes. And it’s published by Notre Dame. Now I got that. I know why Catholics publish it, but it seems to me a conscious choice to not make your arguments dependent on Catholicism.

LLS: Yes, yes. And it’s not a book I wanted to publish with a purely Catholic press.

MO: I got you. I got you. So how did you give a bit of the career trajectory from being received into the Catholic Church to, I guess what I would say is your project as a writer, and you write on a lot of things, not just Catholic theology, ethics, maternity, et cetera, but that’s become a substantial part of your career. And I guess I’m curious, how did you fall into this set of interests and also how would you describe what your project is? Because it’s not consonant with every other Catholic, I could name five Catholics right now who would think you’re hopelessly left wing, and five more would say you’re hopelessly right wing and would try to put you on political axes that wouldn’t feel comfortable. But how did you become who you are as a writer and who is that?

LLS: So Chesterton might say that when I have people complaining I’m too far to the left and too far to the right and all these different excesses that perhaps I am exactly correct and everyone is rankled by how I call out their errors. So hopefully that’s my project, but—

MO: Certainly what I feel about myself, that is absolutely how I flatter myself, that I’m the lone true voice.

LLS: I think I’m often drawn to places where there’s a bridge of two of my interests or two disciplines where I’ve read deeply, where usually there aren’t as many people who crossover and then I get to do a little intellectual yenta-ing between traditions. For me, often in my day job of career that’s between public policy things and the stronger math background where it’s I can now bring people who care a lot about family policy but hate programming and Python data that would be otherwise hard to get because I’m happy to sit down with the nitty gritty of papers and stand in that intersection here for this book. I’ve said the book has two ideas, which I think don’t always sit next to each other. One is the equality of women to men is not premised on our interchangeability with men. And the other is that dependence is the pattern of human life, not an embarrassing departure from real life.

And when I look through the history of feminist thought, or the history of Catholic thought, you see bits and pieces of these ideas pop up at various times. You only get so often that people are saying both of them in the same breath. And that’s a lot of what I want to give people and why I think when someone’s reading the book and the reason it’s not framed as a “you must be this Catholic to enter,” I think almost anyone including a strong abortion activist is going to find a lot they agree with here and then turn a page, find something they strongly disagree with, and I want them to sit a little bit with, “Why did Leah get one thing right and one thing so wrong? What’s her underlying assumption I don’t share? And what do I think of that assumption?”

MO: Can say a bit more about those two arguments, those two premises, and why they are often—

LLS: Yeah. So I think first of all, we live in a world that as a secular plurals world is kind of uncomfortable with philosophy, that the easiest way to make an argument in what some is called like the naked public square is to make a very empirical argument. You mentioned scientific skepticism and vaccines. Those arguments are framed as well, “Look, we have the rates of life saved and we have the rates of adverse events, and this is so wildly lopsided in one side.” We don’t really have to talk about parental autonomy here that comes in when the tradeoffs are murkier and the tradeoffs are so clear. Happily, we don’t have to talk about values now. And I think people find that’s the easiest way to advance an argument now as kind of we implied. But that previous conversation about the atheism blowup, I think it only gets you so far.

There’s a point at which you have to talk about values, or you have to contort yourself so badly to find a purely empirical non-value way of talking about things that matter, that you’re not going to wind up telling the whole truth. And I think the feminist pitch runs into this problem a little bit. Feminism says women are equal in dignity to men. I agree, but the easiest naked public wear way to construct that argument to say women are equal to men because men and women are, to all extents and purposes, with some weird edge cases, but they are edge cases and we can ignore them, the same. And that’s the easiest way to construct an equality. If these two things can be substituted for each other, they’re equal and you have to treat them the same. Now, what this means is that every way men and women differ becomes a threat to the premise of equality. And some of those ways are kind of empirical, well attested, but amoral.

Men have way stronger grip strength than women. That’s a much bigger disparity of kind of those overlapping bell curves than height, which is I think what people think of first men are on average taller than women. Some women are taller than some men, et cetera. But with grip strength, probably not me though, but with grip strength, the two curves are barely touching. And so I can say, okay, men and women really differ substantially in grip strength. Now does this mean women shouldn’t vote? No, obviously not. And it’s not a threat to acknowledge it though. It might make us curious, how do we design the built world? Is it designed for a male default? Would we benefit from making space to talk about women? But reproduction is the most glaring asymmetry between men and women, where again, the bell curves don’t touch.

And the question is, does this make men and women not interchangeable? Yes, right. But what you often see is the attempt to either minimize the toll of pregnancy or the experience of pregnancy so that it won’t count and won’t make women different enough than men. Or in some of the abortion logic saying, because this asymmetry exists, abortion has to be legal in order for women to be equal to men. Because men can always abandon a child. And this is a little bit the actual logic Ruth Bader Ginsburg used. A man can always choose to not be a father, not biologically, but socially. He can just walk away. He can change his name. It might be cowardly, but he has the means to do it. A woman needs someone’s assistance to make that same choice to sever herself, and she has to have it. And now what I would say and Ginsburg wouldn’t is that’s kind of an equality of vice because men can be cowards, women have to have the ability to choose violence against the unborn.

MO: Do you think abortion should be illegal in all circumstances?

LLS: I think almost all circumstances. I think the exception I would make is life of the mother, where you are not intending the death of the baby, but you are going to save the mom’s life even though that will predictably result in the death of the child. I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon.

MO: Right.

LLS: To be clear. And I think you kind of can’t get there. And what I want the pro-life movement to take more seriously is Dobbs took off the handcuffs, right? It was not possible to make laws against abortion until Dobbs. Dobbs does not actually give you the power to make laws against an abortion that stick unless you convince people they’re good laws. And the pro-life movement has to get to the point where it can win abortion rights referenda, and not by working the refs or tweaking the cutoffs. You don’t want a world, I certainly don’t want a world, where abortion is illegal, but it’s only staying suppressed because there’s intense surveillance or crackdowns. You want a world where people believe the law is just, and you’re trying to figure out, well, what can I ban here that people come along with? How can I convince people these laws are just, et cetera?

MO: So a lot of your book really does turn on childbearing. I mean, not every chapter turns on it in the same way, but if you keep cycling back to it. You say early on in the book, a culture that idealizes autonomy can’t value pregnancy. What do you mean by that?

LLS: So I think you often hear that the argument for abortion is both that it respects the woman’s autonomy that her body is being co-opted by someone else, and it’s as unjust for the baby to do that as it would be for you to knock me out and take my kidney. The first part of the autonomy argument.

The second part is, and the baby isn’t autonomous and therefore is not a person in the same way the mom is. The mom isn’t depending on anyone else to breathe for her, et cetera, the baby is. So these are two different orders of being. I find that really unsatisfying just from a philosophical point of view on both fronts. So first of all, it frames the mother and baby as so they have a relationship with strangers, which is not true. I mean, we’ve been on a podcast, but I don’t think that gives you the kind of relationship where you can knock me out and take my kidneys.

MO: No, agreed.

LLS: The language of parasite around child that implicates all of us. Since all of us, and the reason I talk about pregnancy and childbearing so much isn’t just a woman’s book, it’s because being a baby is the universal human experience beginning our lives profoundly dependent is the universal human experience. And I don’t think something changes in a massive moral way after delivery. The baby is still utterly dependent, can’t feed him or herself, can’t deal with his or her own waste. What happens after birth is more people can come to the baby’s aid than just the mother, but there’s actually no meaningful difference in autonomy for the baby before and after delivery, even before and after viability. And when you frame this question of autonomy as both pushing people out of being human and being the one thing humans are meant to preserve, I think you have a lot more casualties than just babies in the womb.

You have a sense that when we shift to needing other people too much, we are in some sense robbing them, we’re degrading them and ourselves. You see the increasing hunger for euthanasia, particularly in Canada where it’s rising to be one of their leading causes of death. And I think that comes out of this logic of you’re only a person when you’re autonomous, and if you need too much from others, you’re assaulting them and you’re degrading yourself. And I think you can disagree with me on abortion, but start to be troubled by the implications of this argument somewhere else. And at the very least, if you don’t want to join me, you want to go, okay, well, what’s my bul work that does protect people who are disabled from being unpersoned in this way, and from feeling that they wrong others by existing?

MO: I mean, you even make the point. I think this is really beautifully put, I hadn’t thought of this, that a fetus say around the age of viability, say, let’s call it five and a half months, if it’s wanted, is seen as an object of wonder. And if it’s not wanted, it’s seen as a parasite. But the only thing that changes is just our own disposition toward it, but that its actual status is the same. And I found that really persuasive and really, really kind of haunting and poignant almost.

LLS: And there’s a really strong story told by Dr. John Bruchalski, who’s a doctor who used to perform abortions who’s now pro-life, of just a night where he was working across two rooms and in one he was completing an abortion and the other he was saving a preemie, and they weighed the same amount and he neglected, in the case of the abortion where the baby was delivered and was not dead yet, to provide medical care. And his hospital had a weight cutoff, but he was rooting for the baby not to cross it and was delaying it. And then the baby did cross it, so did get promoted to the NICU, but one of the other doctors said, “Don’t treat my patients like trash.” For that doctor, it wasn’t as wrong because it’s a NICU nurse. Every baby who turns up is a baby regardless of what sent them there. And it really stuck with him like the strangeness of moving from room to room and it was the mother’s will that determined who this baby was.

MO: You talk about the dignity of dependence. How is it that the idea of dependence cuts through all of this? What is the affirmative vision that reconciles us toward what you see as the right disposition toward pregnancy, toward motherhood,

LLS: Aging, dying? Yeah.

MO: The economic labor of—yeah, aging, dying. The economic labor of being a mother. Because at one point, I mean you’re the first person I’ve read in probably 20 years to make a positive case for, and you don’t quite go there, but you seem sympathetic toward compensated housework toward the old early seventies feminist dream of paying housewives. Though you ultimately I think find that insufficient, but you have a lot of sympathy toward it in a way that I think almost nobody else does anymore. So what’s the positive vision that you call dependence?

LLS: Yeah, so I think the vision of autonomy, and then I’ll contrast it with my vision of dependence, is like in the autonomous human life, you start dependent, very embarrassing, very awkward. You’re a baby in the womb, you probably are not a person. You get born, you’re secretly as dependent, but it’s a rounding error now and then gradually at some point pretty late according to Peter Singer, but most people earlier, you become a person, mazel tov. Maybe you’re 20, you’re working, you’re supporting yourself. Your parents are not old enough for their own aging and need to disrupt your life. You’re not married, you have no baby, you’re a guy. You’re not worried about being pregnant, your body is your own. And then happiest of circumstances, at age 35, you are hit by a truck cut down in your prime, a full autonomous life without any awkward slide into need based on your pregnancy, the needs of your parents, et cetera.

I don’t think you can have a very satisfactory view of a human life where getting hit by a truck is a good thing. And people don’t frame it this way, but I think it’s implied, right? Because you want to avoid the parts of aging. You want to avoid the things that ask a lot of you. You want to extent avoid marriage, which exposes you to the things your wife is undergoing. In my view. You’re just a dependent human being your whole life. And the degree of dependence varies and who can answer that dependence varies. But you start as a baby, utterly, completely intimately dependent on your mom, the full pattern of every human life. You grow a little into things you can take on. You get to figure out where you can use your strength to answer other people’s need.

Ooh, you got pretty sick. You became pretty dependent again. That’s okay. You’re still a person the whole time and now you’re better, but now you’re pregnant and that’s pretty hard on you, and now you’re not but your children’s needs, even when they’re not physically attached to you or disrupting a lot of the choices you might otherwise make for yourself, but you’re coming back at it, oh, your parents are in memory care. You kind of keep having this bopping up and down of how much you are autonomous, a law unto yourself, or how much your whole life is shaped by your own needs and your exposure to the needs of others. And eventually you die with people changing your diapers again in a way that hopefully having read my book is less embarrassing to you than it otherwise would be.

And that’s a lot of what I want to do. I want to remove that layer of shame that says in this moment, I’m not a real person or I’m slipping out of being a person versus—Richard John Newhouse has a line about babies in the womb that I think applies throughout life more than maybe he anticipated it would, given our increasing horror of aging. He says he doesn’t like when people object that a fetus doesn’t look like a human person. He’s like, but that is what a human person looks like. That’s what a human person looks like when they’re 12 weeks old and developing. That’s what I look like and that’s what you would look like. And that’s what every human person looked like. And I think we increasingly look at someone who’s elderly and in care and we say, well, I don’t want to be kept alive when I’m not a person anymore. And the answer once again is, but that is what a person looks like at this age.

MO: I’ve always had the intuition when people talk about I want to die when I no longer have any dignity. That that’s an incoherent statement that there’s nothing undignified about being old and incontinent and in pain. You can say, and I’m going to be more sympathetic to someone saying, I mean I’m against euthanasia, but people who would be forward, who would say, I want to die of my own choice when I’m an unbearable suffering. I think that’s a perfectly comprehensible and intelligible thing to say, but saying, I want to die when I lack dignity. I don’t think human beings ever lack dignity. And so that has always struck me as a kind of bad argument.

LLS: But I think that sense of do human beings lack dignity. We’re clearly asserting that when it comes to the baby in the womb, we are saying there is no dignity here when you need too much from someone else and when you can’t do things for yourself. And I think the question is how much can you silo that away from these other places? Because people do get catechized. I think they get catechized in it very strongly on the abortion issue, and then for a less controversial example, you’ll hear a lot of the ways that people do care for each other. If you bring me soup when I’m sick and I say, “Thank you, Mark,” a common response is, “It was no trouble.” And what does that imply? It implies that if it were a trouble for you to bring me soup, it would’ve been wrong for me to ask.

MO: I don’t think you need to have that reading of it, though. I think the person who’s saying it was no trouble means the satisfaction I took from doing it outweighed the obvious inconvenience.

LLS: That’s a real different statement. If you want to say that, I suggest you say, “It was a pleasure to do this for you. I’m so glad you asked me to.” But I think we spend, and this is now my latent virtue ethics coming out. we spend a lot of time in casual social encounters where we are little by little habituated ourself to the idea that needing too much is bad. Asking things of people that you could solve yourself is bad, and then that does build up the sense of what am I going to do in the big moments?

MO: I hear you, but I actually don’t think it’s the latent virtue ethicist. I think it’s the latent computer programmer, which is I think you’re being highly precise, overly literal, and overly precise and overly punctilious, which by the way, accords entirely with why you’d be attracted to Catholicism and all of that stuff. That, my sense—

LLS: You wouldn’t put Judaism, it’s another book of law and book of long running arguments with textual citations—

MO: I was actually going to get to that.

But which has an entirely different ethics around gestation, which is it understands that people obviously are not as attached to a four week old fetus as they are to a seven month old fetus. And the Talmud is incredibly wishy-washy on the question. I’m not trying to yoke Talmudic rabbinic Judaism into the pro-choice movement where I think it fits very poorly. However, it’s not remotely where Catholicism is right down to the fact that if you lose a child, if you lose a premature child, or if you lose a baby under, I think it’s under 30 days or something, you don’t do the full cycle of mourning that it’s actually not seen, which anthropologically is just true, that people don’t attach—I mean, I can say like you having gone through a marriage where there have been multiple miscarriages, and I mean, I had a brother who died at two days. I mean, I’ve been there and back, not in the same way that a mother has, but people don’t attach to the one day old the way they attach to a 1-year-old. It’s a different level of loss. I think you’d agree. And one of the things that’s so interesting is the way that you named your miscarriages, which you talk about in the book. The only people I know have done that are Roman Catholics. I don’t know.

LLS: That’s actually not my experience.

MO: I’m not saying only, wait, lemme finish. I’m not saying only Roman Catholics do it, but the only people I know who have done it are Roman Catholics that may be a small sample size.

LLS: I think it’s a little bit about sampling frame because I’ve heard Jews who told me they think of their baby by name, even though I know they don’t get to do the eight day naming. I’m looking forward to going one of those this weekend. Right?

MO: I know people who’ve said, Kaddish for the loss of a baby. People play with the rules as they should to do whatever brings them comfort and makes them feel godliness in their grief. And I have no qualms with that. I’ve been to Kaddish.

LLS: I don’t agree with this. This is the thing I get sometimes for my miscarriages. We’re like, well, if it brought you comfort to feel sad, I’m not saying well talking. I think it does matter. Yeah, I think it does matter whether I’m right, right.

MO: Well, right.

LLS: Someone who’s not a person—

MO: Again, that’s the computer scientist in you.

LLS: It’s just person. We’re all called to be philosophers even if you’ve never programmed a line of code. If I’m mourning someone who’s genuinely not a person, I’m airing to do it just as I would if I were mourning a doll. like it was a person.

MO: So should I not mourn my dog?

LLS: Doll, I said, doll.

MO: No, no I’m asking. I know you did. I’m saying dog, D-O-G. Should I not mourn my dog?

LLS: I think you can though. I think if you had the same feelings as for a person, there would be an error. Right. I’m a human supremacist. I think people are qualitatively different than animals, which doesn’t mean we don’t have concern for them or love them.

MO: I understand you. The point I was making is that your attachment to this sort of primacy of rules is one way of attaching to religion and to religious truth, and it’s not the only way.

LLS: I don’t think it’s exclusive to religion for any moral philosophy. It matters what’s true or not. You can be an atheist and then it still matters. Like, am I correct? Is this a person? Of course, if you look at effective altruism, people get very into these questions of what duties do I have to wild animals?

MO: To be clear, I don’t look too effective altruism. I think they’re largely bonkers, but if you do, that’s nice. But wait a second. But I mean—

LLS: I like that they’re very morally serious and they’re open to the question of, could I be wrong? Do I, like many people live in a society that I think I’m moral horror?

MO: Let me say this. Of course what’s true matters, it also matters that say police officers have discretion when they’re pulling people over if they’re going five miles over the speed limit or 35 miles over the speed limit and you don’t build successful societies, nor do you have faith in law. I mean, what you have is you have Mussolini’s Italy or Franco’s Spain if things are a hundred percent safe, right? And if end of laws are followed to the T as a, and you also have what I would say as a kind of idolatry, right? In that case, you’re putting the law above the people, all of which is to say, we’re getting off some very different things here, that I’m curious if you think that there can be a morally coherent or serious vision. And here I’m thinking of rabbinic Judaism that sees gray areas in gestating fetuses in a way that Catholicism doesn’t, or are they just murderers?

LLS: I don’t think it’s morally coherent, though I also think most people don’t hold morally coherent beliefs. And I think the role of law in a democracy is trying to figure out what’s a plausible compromise that lets us live with each other and my job is persuading you to agree with me so that I can win the actual vote and then pass a better law. That’s the answer.

MO: But if you’re trying to persuade people that the loss of a one day old, or a fetus, ought to be as painful to them as the loss of a five-year-old, I mean that strikes me as bad anthropology.

LLS: It’s the same person. Let me give you a different analogy where I think the, is it as painful is not the right question. If your child, they have gestational difficulties, congenital problems, and they’re dying your arms with preparation the day they’re born, is that, or should that be as painful as if your 5-year-old is mulled by a dog and dies? They’re really different experiences. I don’t really care if I can check whose is more painful. I’m just saying, did you lose your child in both these circumstances? Yes.

MO: Sure. But what we were talking about is what it means to think of personhood and dignity and human dependence.

LLS: And I’m saying did a person die in both these cases? Yes.

MO: And also it’s the case that we evolved, or if you like we were created, to not respond the same way for very understandable reasons among others that we’ve put more care into and received more from the person we’ve known. I mean—

LLS: I don’t agree with that part. I don’t agree with that part.

MO: You were certainly right about the coherence of your views. It also leads to my caring, it leads to a kind of Peter Singer type utilitarianism where I ought to care as much about the person I don’t know who’s in Nepal or Australia as the person I’ve raised.

LLS: I think you should think that person is the same order of being as your child. And the question is, am I prepared to be a good steward to them in the same way? And the answer is no. I can do my best job caring for someone from far away with my money because I don’t know them well enough to say, oh, and you and Nepal just push the other kid in Nepal. How can I help you? Right.

MO: No, no.

LLS: I have different duties to the people who are close to

MO: Difference isn’t that I know. Isn’t that I can be a better steward? The difference is that I’m in relation to them in a different kind of way.

LLS: Well, ideally in the end, we’re all saints in heaven together.

MO: Well, that’s what I’m saying.

LLS: There’s a particularity in our human relationships, but I can’t love them any less. I just have less capacity to love them and I’m less placed to love them well.

MO: I think my point was, and there’s nothing wrong with this, I was trying to identify why does this particular chapter in a book I otherwise love sit a little bit awkwardly with me, is that it is that Christian universalism, the idea, right? I mean the idea that we’re, in a sense we’re rejecting the primacy of our immediate family for the primacy of all humans, which is not intelligible to a Jewish worldview, and doesn’t, as we see it, accord with the way any human being has ever lived except like Simone Weil and a few other saints wandering around. But as soon as—

LLS: Or most consecrated or most consecrated religious who choose to pray for the whole world in seclusion as a nun rather than have a family, there are traditions throughout history, they are mostly Catholic traditions always.

MO: Right, they’re not Jewish traditions. They’re not Jewish traditions. And by the way, I actually thought you were playing a little bit fast and loose there, and I know you’re a former debater, you’re okay with this, with my coming straight at this here—

LLS: No, this is a very fun conversation. You’re actually asking me strong questions, not just what did this book mean to you?

MO: Thank you.

There’s also the valorization of the consecrated religious of the monks and the nuns for your project of dependency I thought fails a little bit because yes, they take care of each other in a sense, but they are abjuring the kind of care that you do for your three children and that I do for my children in a very profound way to spend a lot of time reading books and chanting and making beer, et cetera, and I’m not diminishing that. I think that can be a very worthy life. I think everyone should live the life they’re called to live so long as they’re not people.

LLS: What I would say is the premise of consecrated life makes no sense if Catholicism is not true. If you are not giving over your life to God and offering your days for the whole life of the world, then yeah, you’re just living in a house with people.

I do believe they’re doing that. So I think it is giving up some natural human connections for this higher one that’s a pretaste of heaven, but it is a weird thing to do, and it only makes sense if you’re sustaining the world in a life of prayer.

MO: Okay, good. I think we actually agree on that.

LLS: I don’t think anyone should become a consecrated religious unless they actually think Catholicism is true because then it isn’t a good use of your life.

MO: Unless they’re super fricking hardcore. I gotcha, I gotcha. I mean, I should say one of my—

LLS: Many things don’t hold up if you take away a big part of the leg here.

MO: Right, one of my best friends from college, I wouldn’t say my best friend, one of my best friends from college spent 15, 20 years as a Carmelite priest. And so he was not a Carmelite monk, and I mean he was very much in the community, and then he left, got married, has a child, went through the whole process, asked to be released from his vows. He didn’t just walk away. He wanted to stay right with the Vatican, and I have a very strong appreciation for what that life meant to him, and what rankles me about it is the sort of for many, the withdrawal from, especially if they’re cloistered, the withdrawal from community and what I see and you see as the common human obligation that we have to each other.

LLS: Actually I’ll give one more example there and then we’ll kind of work close at point is going to turn up. When I visited a group of trap monks in Iowan, I was visiting because they have a coffin ministry. They make coffins and they give them for free to parents who lose a child. That was what they do there.

MO: You know who else does this by the way, the Burial Society of Pittsburgh, the Jewish Burial Society.

LLS: Excellent.

MO: There’s a guy there who said, why are we buying our coffins when we could make our own? And he got a carpenter, orthodox Jew from the community and they started making coffins in the basement of the synagogue. Carry on.

LLS: That’s excellent.

MO: It is excellent.

LLS: They do this one kind of good work that both you and I agree is good, but they do something else that I think just you don’t believe they’re doing it. And that’s the disagreement. They have chanted prayers in the middle of the night and they’re praying for people who are awake and alone in that moment.

Now, if you don’t believe that that’s doing anything, then that’s kind of a waste of their sleep and a fantasy that they’re helping someone. And if you do believe in the economy of grace, then they’re very much active in the world by being secluded. They are standing alongside someone who is—one of them gave the example of just someone who’s thinking of committing a crime in the late part of the night. He was dedicated his prayer for them not knowing their name, so they’re very plugged into the world, but in this hidden economy of grace, if that’s false, then they aren’t. If it’s true, then they are, and that’s where that computer program or precision comes back in, right?

MO: No, you’re such a computer programmer.

LLS: It’s not a good use of a life to spend that much time in contemplative prayer if there isn’t contemplative prayer in a meaningful sense.

MO: I’m enough of a romantic and an aesthete to believe it’s beautiful regardless.

LLS: No, it isn’t. It’s disgusting.

MO: That’s the computer programmer about you. But I actually think it is.

LLS: It’s the truth teller in me.

MO: What I would say, what I would say—it’s so funny, you’re like one tick removed from the atheist you used to be. It’s so funny.

LLS: I’m the same person. I’m the same person.

MO: You’re same person.

LLS: I updated my model of the world.

MO: Right, different software, different inputs.

There are a lot of prayers in the daily Jewish prayer service that ask for intercession, but I don’t think the validity of saying those prayers rest on whether or not the intercession happens because I think they are virtue building for the people who say them and they instantiate an attitude towards life and a disposition to life.

LLS: Lame. Lame. If that’s true, you should find a better way of doing it that doesn’t involve teaching yourself lies.

MO: It’s not if it’s true. If it’s not true, it’s that I’m expressing a kind of epistemic humility about whether or not it’s true. You’re hanging a lot on being right and I don’t need.

LLS: Yes.

MO: And what I’m saying is I could be wrong and that doesn’t invalidate how I spend my time because, and the odds are I’m wrong about 40 to 80% of the time anyway. What I think is interesting about the particular Catholic disposition you’re talking about is there’s a lot of egoism in requiring yourself to be that right. Because, I mean, it’s the aught implies can, it’s back to deontology. What if you’re not right and what if you don’t have a shot at being right?

LLS: But most people are in the same boat. We all act based on our best models of the world. There’s very few ways you can hold yourself back and go, well, I’m uncertain and therefore I just won’t make big choices in life. You make them by omission. Everyone acts according to the best model of the world, and when our models are wrong, whether we kind of proclaim them loudly or not, we do less good or actively do harm than we would if our models were correct.

MO: Yeah, but you’ll never know. There will never be good evidence as to whether these prayers in the middle of the night are doing good or not, whether they’re right or wrong, and I respect that they’re just, they’ve taken a leap of faith. They think they’re right and they’re going for it. I’m not going to say that it was wasted time. If it turns out, if new evidence comes up that they were wrong, I’m going to condemn them less, ironically, I think than you.

LLS: Don’t you think there are some moral errors people can make that they are culpably on the hook for?

MO: Sure.

LLS: Insufficient curiosity about treatment of prisoners in prison, insufficient curiosity about animal rights, and then going along with a default that makes you complicit and active harm.

MO: Hey, you’re preaching to a vegetarian here. I have enormous, enormous regret that more people whom I know and love and cherish are completely indifferent to the suffering of animals. It strikes me as the single moral error of our time that will come to look back on with tremendous shame. And yet I try to have compassion for the finitude of people and recognize that it wouldn’t make sense to me to just think that much less of them all the time for what I take to be an obvious moral error.

LLS: I don’t want to think less of them all the time, but I want a certain amount of urgency in telling them what I think is right and why and asking them why they differ genuinely, curiously. When I had a pro and anti-abortion conversation in my living room with cookies, with friends, one, the folks said that they were vegan.

MO: I hope you called it that on the flyer.

LLS: Yes, I said, “Abortion and Cookies.” It was after Whole Women’s Health w. Hellerstedt, and we wanted to have a better conversation. Right on.

MO: Okay.

LLS: So one of the folks who was there, who was a guy said, well, look, I’m vegan, just like you, and to me pretty strongly, also, I think the way we treat animals is something we already have enough knowledge to know is wrong. It’s a matter of the will to stop. And he says, and when I think about animals, I err on the side of if it looks like it might be suffering, I should err on the side of assuming it’s suffering. He goes, and I understand I’m not doing that for babies in the womb or fetuses in the womb anyways. And he said, finally, it’s because I’m not a woman and I think if I were a woman, I’d be pro-life, but because it’s not me on the line, I feel uncomfortable.

I think that was a really productive conversation, but it’s about what can we know is true? How should we check? And when we find ourselves in uncertainty about huge moral questions, well then how can we lean into it? What’s going to give us more clarity? How can we have those dialogues? But with the goal of winding up on the same side, whether it’s me coming over to you or you coming over to me, let’s not politely tolerate each other indefinitely when each of us thinks the other’s engaged in a moral horror, even if we’re doing it in good faith.

MO: I like to win. I don’t disagree with you there. I think I probably am a little—

LLS: But I like to lose if I’m wrong, right? I’ve done it several times.

MO: Me too. I wasn’t always a vegetarian. I like to be a little more ginger about what I think is definitely a moral horror. I have a mystical sense that there’s more, I don’t know. Again, this is like the atheist-Catholic axis, right? I mean, look, Catholicism is the religion where you can buy everything you’re supposed to know in one volume in Barnes and Noble. The Catechism is available for sale. And I think that there’s a loss of, ironically, given that it’s attrition with a healthy respect for mysticism, there’s a kind of loss of cloud of unknowing type mystical naivete in that level of Jesuitical certainty. I hope that’s not a put down.

LLS: How do you think about the strong claims of Christian abolitionists who didn’t tend to say, I wonder if there’s something I’m missing here?

MO: I mean, I’m glad that they had them and that they were right. I mean, sure. I’m not against people having strong claims. In my own life, I tend to be cherry of making many of those claims too strongly. I don’t tend to be cherry of making them when it comes to animal rights.

Forgive me for redirecting. And by the way, do you have more time? I have more time.

LLS: Just a wee bit because my son’s on a walk and at some point he’ll burst back into the door.

MO: Oh Jesus. Okay, sorry about that. Does your human supremacy sort of calibrate how you think about animal welfare? Are you with me on vegetarianism?

LLS: So I am a vegetarian. I’ve been since I was five though. I also have the benefit of I hate meat, I just hate it. So I’ve never had to weigh as strongly personally which ways to consume animals might be ethical. I think you strongly believe that many of the ways we do are not ethical. Made me think it was more likely it was possible to ethically consume animals, though not in the ways we’re currently doing it.

MO: Yeah, I mean, I’ll just put this out there since you’re someone with a Catholic audience. I mean, if we could get a multi-faith coalition together against factory farming—

LLS: Yeah.

MO: Which is such an obvious moral evil, both for the recipients of the animals and the humans, it just strikes me as a no-brainer. And I think we wouldn’t be able to, because I actually think a lot of the conservative Christians and conservative Jews are too culturally attached to their, I think as Augustine says, their pride swollen faces have blind to them. I just think they can’t see, it would be too much to ask. A lot of Jews I know to give up chicken for Friday night dinner and a lot of Catholics to give up their, they’re going fish on Fridays, but that means they get meat every, it’s—

LLS: I think the pitch is mostly you want to eat a lot less of it and one that was humanely raised and treated in accordance with its animal dignity, which doesn’t mean never taking its life.

MO: I think that would be an enormous moral victory if we thought people would eat a lot less of it. For sure.

LLS: You invite me anytime for that fight and I’ll be right there with you.

MO: Right on. If we have another moment, I want to ask you the society you’re talking about where we see dependence as okay, and therefore value childbirth more therefore value staying at home and doing the work that’s involved at home of child rearing and elder care more value the workplace a bit less policy-wise. How do we construct that?

LLS: I think there are some parts you can do more easily on the policy front and some parts that are just culture and people talking to each other and setting examples. One of the main things is that we don’t support people very much in becoming parents that it’s hard to do. You take a big income hit right away when you’re doing it, and a lot of our law is set up as though both the income and the health consequences are trivial. We have no paid family leave. We do have a child tax credit, which I like though it’s not really in proportion to what parents are doing. So in my day job, I advocate for a baby bonus, which is a payment that comes right after birth in almost the same way unemployment insurance does, right? You’ve done something that kind of disrupts your working life. Whatever you do next, whether it’s staying home, whether going back to work, you’ve still got this disruption. We’re helping you bridge the gap.

But I think if you just look at that, this is where I think you can shift back into that naked public square empiricism. Are many women prepared to go back to work at six weeks if even that or two weeks? No. Physically, no. Just starting with a policy of paid leave, which other peer countries have that says, alright, well let’s just start with are you bleeding massively? If so, probably there should be a clear option for you to be home. And then you push it a little to say like, do babies have a particular distinct relationship with their parents such that it should be a lot easier, even if not everyone makes this choice to stay home for six months? Yes.

I think you want beyond that, just a lot more welcoming of babies in everyday life. You don’t want moms who are staying home with their babies to be under house arrest. And so some of that is where are you welcoming people, bringing kids, having kid-friendly worlds to move into. Some of that is how do you have public orders that moms can comfortably get on public transit with a baby and feel safe and she could go places? How do you have lively neighborhoods full of people? Those are less parent specific policies. But something I really like coming out of, I was just at the abundance conference last week, of just a sense of what makes our neighborhoods vibrant and dynamic and have that Jane Jacob’s eyes on the street kind.

MO: So everything you’re saying, and I really, I’m saying this not to try to score points, I actually don’t know whom you voted for, where you came down politically, as somebody who really is just kind of trying to search through the morass, I don’t feel particularly beholden to either political party at this point, I want good policies. I want good family friendly policies. I think where everything you’ve said is exactly what I believe. It looks a lot like heavy handed transit planning, a lot of subsidization for trains, buses—

LLS: Also legalizing building homes in the suburbs.

MO: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s a lot of licensing. It’s a lot of social democracy as well. It’s a lot of higher taxes. There seems to be, I would say 80 percent of the program is amenable to the lefties I know. And about 10% of the program is amenable to the righties. I know. And it’s a few specific righties.

LLS: Yeah, yeah. There’s a new right wing, but it’s not the mainstream of the GOP, I wouldn’t argue that.

MO: It’s not the mainstream. And when they talk about it, when the Josh Hawleys and JD Vances talk about it, they still end up voting for policies that are horribly contrary to it, time and again. There is no meaningful voting coalition on the right for expanded parental leave. And in fact, if you look historically at who has fought the little inches we’ve made like FMLA, it is always the right, and I am somewhat despondent that people in your shoes don’t say like, I really have to be working within the left broadly construed. I suspect it has to do with abortion. But let’s face it, like what you’re saying is we need to look a lot more like Sweden. But with natalism.

LLS: I’m happy to work with anyone who will work with me. And I think if you try and pass these things and say, I’m holding out for what we can pass paid family medical leave. When there’s a Democratic trifecta, you’re going to be waiting a long time, especially with the Senate composition. So what I want is to talk to anyone who’s up to talk to me so that you’ve got four new right senators who do become the other votes to get to 60 on paid family leave instead of waiting for a trifecta. The most durable expansions of the social safety net have happened when you can get bipartisan support for them. I think these are not implausible reaches.

MO: But wasn’t it Mitch McConnell who said, we will give Joe Biden, or Obama and then Biden, not one vote as policy. I mean, what has thwarted this is an intransigence created as a matter of policy by the right to thwart. I mean, in the same way they weren’t going to let Obama have a Supreme Court appointee as lockstep as the left can be, and I’m a tremendous critic of it, it’s nothing like the lockstepness on the right that they won’t vote for a tax increase. They won’t. So what do you do? I mean, who are the bright lights? I don’t believe that Josh Hawley has, I don’t believe there’s anyone sincere on this in the right. Who are they?

LLS: So I do think there are some folks who are sincere.

MO: Who are they?

LLS: When I have meetings—because this relates directly to my day job, I can’t always talk about the meetings I take in that context. But I’ve been in GOP offices where people are earnestly trying to write a baby bonus bill, fighting hard to get the CTC pushed up and got some victories in reconciliation. They’re not the majority of the caucus, but they exist and they’re trying pretty hard with headwinds. And the question is, can you get more of them?

And I think the thing that I’d love your help over coming on the left is active hostility from a wing, not the whole thing of the left to anything that’s pro-family policy framed as pro-family policy. I can get stuff as long as it’s family neutral. But the second I started talking about a baby bonus, I got pushback from women’s groups, for saying it was anti-women to give people a check after a baby is born. And I don’t think they’re right, and I don’t think they’re the whole of Democratic caucus or the mainstream, but that’s why I’m looking for every inch I can take because it is ultimately a game of inches to get these policies across the line.

MO: I completely agree, and I’m sorry we can’t go longer, but Leah Libresco Sargeant, congrats on everything. The book is “The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto.”

My page proofs say not for sale, but they actually just mean this copy of is not for sale. The book is actually for sale.

LLS: October 1st.

MO: October 1st. Okay. Rock on. Thanks, Leah. Take care.

LLS: Thanks so much.

MO: All right, friends, time for celebrity birthdays and upcoming world religious holidays.

October 11th, Cardi B, one of my daughter’s favorite rappers, hip hop artists, turns something. I’m not sure what, but she has a birthday coming up on October 11th. John Krasinski on October 20th, Snoop Dogg also October 20th. Actually, I want to announce that October 20th may be the most important birthday day in the calendar. You’ve got John Krasinski from The Office and various shoot him up thrillers on Amazon Prime; you have Snoop Dogg; you have Viggo Mortensen, the actor; and Kamala Harris. Boom. How’s that for October 20th? Those are your celebrity birthdays.

We’re in the season of a lot of interesting religious holidays. If you’re Jewish, you are still observing. Coming up will be and then, which celebrates the completion of the annual cycle of Torah reading. Roman Catholics remember Teresa of Avila on the Feast of St. Teresa Avila on October 15th. Hindus, Jayan and Sikhs celebrate Diwali on October 20th. And then two Baha’i holidays coming up on October 22nd, and then 23rd and 24th birthday of the Bab, the Herald of the Baha’i faith, and then birthday of Baha’u’llah, the founder of Baha’i on October 20th into the 24th.

Arc: The Podcast is hosted by me, Mark Oppenheimer, and I would love your feedback. Please write to me at mark.o@wustl.edu. The show is produced and edited by David Sugarman, our interns right now, Avi Holzman, Ben Esther, Caroline Coffey. None of this would happen without all of them. Audio consulting by Robert Scaramuccia and over at the Danforth Center. We’re grateful for the hard work of Abram Van Engen, Debra Kennard, Mark Valeri, Sheri Pena, and more. Our music is by Love Cannon. Our web design is by Cause and Effect online@causexeffect.com. Until next time, I remain, and hopefully will remain, Mark Oppenheimer.