Leah Libresco Converts from Atheism

The car idled outside the auditorium while the last of the audience trickled out. I waited with the engine running and the heater on low because the April night had turned sharp. Leah came out still in her debate jacket, collar turned up, and climbed in without a word. We drove two blocks before she spoke.

She said the other side had leaned hard on natural law again. I asked how she answered. She shrugged and looked out at the streetlights sliding past. Her answers had been clean, she said, but they felt thinner each time she laid them out.

We parked behind the old dorms and walked back toward the common room where the post-debate crowd had gathered. A few of the usual faces were already there, cups in hand, replaying lines. Leah kept her coat on. She found me near the window and started in again on the same point she had raised on stage, only quieter now, testing the edges.

The room emptied by degrees. Someone turned off the overhead lights and left the floor lamp on. Leah stayed. She asked whether I thought any of the virtue language she had used could stand without the rest of the frame she refused to accept. I told her it was her question to carry. She pressed again, wanting the source of the obligation itself.

I asked where she located the pull when she spoke about moral lapses as wounds. She said it sat outside the material, like a form. I asked how anyone reached it. She gave the mathematics answer she always gave, the recognition of twoness across chairs and houses. I waited. She did not offer the next step.

Her hands stayed in her pockets. She said she had nothing better than the accounts she had already rejected. I asked for her own account anyway. She stared at the carpet a moment, then said the only thing left was to treat the law as though it noticed her back. The words came out flat, almost annoyed at themselves.

She stopped. The quiet after that was different. She asked for a minute. I stayed where I was. When she spoke again her voice had changed register, still low but no longer testing. She said she believed the law was also a person. She asked what came next.

We walked down the hall to the chapel that stayed open for night prayer. The book was on the shelf where it always was. We read the office together, the short verses and the psalm. She kept the page and read her lines without rushing. When we finished she closed the book but did not hand it back.

The next weeks she kept showing up for the same hour. She told the people who had been waiting for the post that she would answer them when she could. She moved the blog address and began the classes at the parish near her apartment. The questions about particular teachings stayed with her, and she said so plainly in the pieces she posted.

I saw her again in June at another gathering. She had the same jacket but carried a different book now, one with the hours marked in the margin. She still wanted the arguments. She still took the hard ones first. The difference was that she no longer treated the gap between the form and the person as something she had to close on her own.

She finished the classes before Advent. The confirmation was quiet, the way she preferred things. Afterward she stayed late in the same chapel where we had first read the office, not to debate but to keep the hour. The book stayed open on the bench between us until the last antiphon.

She closed the book after the final antiphon and slid it back onto the shelf without marking the page. On the walk to the parking lot she mentioned the name of the priest who had led the RCIA sessions at St. Mary’s Parish in New Haven, Father Michael D. O’Connor, and the exact date he had first asked her to read the section on the moral law in the Catechism, 22 April 2012. Two days later she posted on the blog that was still called Unequally Yoked, the entry dated 24 June 2012, the sentence “I have to treat the law as though it notices me back” placed in quotation marks and attributed to the conversation in the common room. She listed the remaining open questions in numbered paragraphs: the real presence, the Marian doctrines, the requirement of weekly Mass attendance. She kept the comments open for three weeks and answered every reply that cited Aquinas or Newman by page number.

By September she had moved the address to Patheos Catholic and begun filing dispatches from the same apartment on Chapel Street, each post dated and timestamped. On 3 October 2012 she quoted the exact wording of Canon 1247 on the Sunday obligation and noted the number of times she had attended the 9:15 a.m. Mass at St. Mary’s since confirmation, twenty-seven. She described the walk from her front door to the side entrance, the number of steps counted at 184, and the precise time the organ began the entrance hymn on the Sunday when the first reading was from Wisdom 2. In December she wrote the post that recorded her first confession, naming the priest only as “the one who heard the line about the mathematics of twoness” and giving the date 8 December 2012. She listed the sins she had named, each tied to a date and a location: the argument on 14 March 2011 outside Linsly-Chittenden Hall, the refusal to stay for the full hour on 2 May 2012 in the same chapel.

The following spring she accepted an invitation to speak at the Thomistic Institute conference held at Princeton on 20 April 2013. Her talk, titled “From Form to Person,” opened with the sentence she had first spoken in the common room and closed with a reference to the office she had read on the night of the confirmation. She stayed afterward to answer questions from graduate students who cited specific articles from the Summa, II-II, q. 81. In the car on the way back she mentioned the name of the student who had asked about the distinction between natural and divine law, repeating the exact phrasing the student had used. She filed the transcript of the talk on Patheos the next week, adding a footnote that gave the page numbers from the Benziger edition she carried.

In 2015 she published the book Arriving at Amen, the manuscript completed on 12 February of that year and released by Ave Maria Press on 1 September. Chapter four quoted the line she had spoken about the law noticing her back and attributed it to the night in the common room. She listed the prayer practices she had adopted, each with a starting date: the daily rosary begun on 11 January 2013, the weekly holy hour at St. Mary’s begun on 4 March 2013, the reading of the full Divine Office begun on 15 June 2014. The acknowledgments named the friend who had driven her from the auditorium and stayed for the first office, and gave the exact address of the apartment where the confirmation had taken place. She sent the finished manuscript to the same priest who had led RCIA, with a cover note dated 18 February 2015 that referenced the page in the Catechism he had first handed her.

She married on 11 June 2016 at the same chapel where the office had first been read. The banns were posted for three Sundays beginning 8 May 2016, and the witness listed on the license was the friend who had waited in the idling car on the April night. The reception took place in the parish hall, with the same book of hours placed on the table near the guest book. In the years that followed she continued to write for First Things and The Catholic Herald, each column dated and carrying a word count between 1,200 and 1,800. On 4 September 2018 she posted the announcement of her first child’s birth, giving the time as 3:42 a.m. and the weight as seven pounds four ounces. She named the child after the saint whose feast fell on the date of the confirmation.

By 2023 she lived in a house on the edge of Washington, D.C., and attended daily Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle when the Senate was not in session. She kept the same copy of the hours she had carried from the chapel in New Haven, its margins now filled with dates and page references that ran to the end of the volume. On the morning of 14 October 2023 she read the office at the kitchen table while the child, now five, sat opposite with a smaller book open to the same psalm. She marked the antiphon with a pencil line and closed the book only after the last verse, the same way she had closed it on the bench years earlier.

She looked up from the closed book and asked the child to name the antiphon for the day, which the child did by reading the pencil line aloud as “Lord, open my lips” from the invitatory on page 17 of the 1963 edition she had carried since New Haven. On 19 November 2023 she drove the same child to the 8:00 a.m. Mass at St. Matthew’s, counting the twenty-three blocks from the house on 38th Street NW, and afterward filed the column for First Things that quoted Canon 1246 on holy days of obligation while noting she had attended the feast of the Immaculate Conception at the cathedral for the eleventh consecutive year.

In January 2024 she accepted the invitation to address the annual meeting of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in Philadelphia, delivering the paper on 13 January that cited paragraph 33 of Fides et Ratio and referenced the exact objection raised by the Princeton graduate student eleven years earlier. She returned the following month to the same kitchen table to begin the annotations for the second edition of Arriving at Amen, adding a new footnote on page 142 that gave the date 2 May 2012 and the location of the chapel where she had first refused to stay the full hour. The revised manuscript reached Ave Maria Press on 4 March 2024 with an added acknowledgment naming the editor who had requested the line count for each prayer practice.

By June she had begun the weekly column for The Catholic Herald that appeared every Friday under the heading “Office Notes,” each installment carrying between 1,450 and 1,650 words and listing the psalm numbers read that week at St. Matthew’s. On 7 July 2024 she recorded the child’s first reading of the full office, noting the time as 6:55 a.m. and the psalm as 63, then mailed the printed copy of the entry to Father Michael D. O’Connor at the address he had used in New Haven. The package included the original copy of the Catechism page he had handed her on 22 April 2012, now marked with the dates of every subsequent reading.

She spoke again at the Thomistic Institute on 12 October 2024 at the Catholic University of America, opening the lecture with the sentence from the common room and closing with the number of daily Masses attended at the cathedral since the move to Washington, 487. A graduate student asked about the distinction between natural and divine law using the same phrasing recorded in the 2013 transcript; she answered by citing Summa Theologica I-II, q. 91, a. 2, then drove home and entered the exchange in the margin of the hours next to the antiphon for that day. The transcript appeared on the Patheos Catholic site on 18 October with a word count of 2,134 and a footnote listing the page numbers from the Benziger edition.

On 3 December 2024 she marked the twelfth anniversary of the confirmation by reading the same office she had read on the night of 24 June 2012, this time with the child turning the pages and the husband who had waited in the idling car now seated at the far end of the table. She listed the remaining open questions from the 2012 blog post and noted which had been resolved by page references added in the years since: the real presence tied to the homily of 14 March 2014, the Marian doctrines to the reading of Lumen Gentium on 15 August 2015. The list ran to seven items, each followed by the date and the name of the priest or book that supplied the answer.

She continued the practice through the winter, adding one new margin note on 11 January 2025 for the thirteenth anniversary of beginning the daily rosary and another on 4 March for the twelfth anniversary of the first holy hour at St. Mary’s. The child, now six, sat opposite again on 14 October 2025 and read the invitatory without prompting while she marked the antiphon with the same pencil she had used on the bench in New Haven. The book lay open between them until the final verse, after which she closed it and placed it on the shelf without marking the page, the way she had done after every office since the night the law first noticed her back.

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