Life in the Third Oikos: A Conversation With Leah Libresco Sargeant

Leah Libresco Sargeant has a remarkable gift for making her whole extended network into a community. Leah is the author of Building the Benedict Option, Arriving at Amen, and The Dignity of Dependence, and newly the editorial director at the Institute for Progress. She and her husband Alexi are raising their children in Hyattsville, Maryland, a neighborhood which includes a strong, intentional Catholic community held up by guaranteed meal trains and borrowed tools. Here, we discuss faith, marriage, parenting, tech, and work-family balance. (The following interview has been adapted and condensed from a two-part series that is available in full on the Third Oikos Substack).

Nicole Williams Ruiz: I would love to hear where you grew up and how you were raised.

Leah Libresco Sargeant: I grew up on Long Island, in a secular, liberal family. Both my parents were ultimately university professors. It was a house with huge amounts of intellectual curiosity and a strong sense of social responsibility. I've inherited from my parents, even if they don't totally approve of where I've taken it, a strong expectation that whatever's the default in culture may not be just. You can't look around at what other people are doing to act rightly. You need something else to hold on to.

Ruiz: What were some of the formative moments that changed your path?

Sargeant: Becoming Catholic was the result of very slowly losing a long argument. I was an atheist growing up in an atheist family. No one can have atheism as a life philosophy, and I didn't either. Growing up, I would have said that I was a Stoic deontologist from a surprisingly early middle-school age, which meant I cared about two things: distinguishing clearly between what I could and could not control, and focusing on the latter. I thought of this as being fundamentally truthful about the world.

In deontology, whatever you do has to be something you can will as a universal law. There are no exceptions. No, "I'm doing this one bad thing, but I'm offsetting it in this particular way, so I can buy my way out," in the way utilitarianism leaves you open to. It's just, "Can I will this for everyone? If not, it's not allowed." That was where I was going into college.

Becoming Catholic was the result of very slowly losing a long argument.

In college, I met surprisingly smart Christians, which was confusing to me — having read New Atheist takedowns of dumb Christians. Obviously, I wanted to learn more about them so I could stop them. The atheist apologetics I had learned from the Four Horsemen were not sufficient for the mostly Catholic and Eastern Orthodox friends I was making. I had to learn a lot more about Christianity in order to fight with them, and ultimately, I lost. And won.

Ruiz: Was this at the same moment that you met your husband?

Sargeant: My husband, Alexi, belonged to the same debate society as me, and it is how we met, but we didn't overlap at all in college. I graduated in 2011. He graduated in 2015, and I met him because, as a bunch of huge weirdos, alumni come back a lot for events. I'd met him as an undergraduate when I had graduated, but we did not start dating until after he graduated.

Ruiz: You said on the Niskanen podcast that one of the best ways to find someone to marry is to belong to a debating circle, where every week you hear people argue about what the good life consists of, how you know, what's good art, how to create it, how to form yourself, whether you should be a great man or a good man, and whether they're in tension. You said: "Listen to all these and go, 'I'll marry that one.'" What did you marry in him?

Sargeant: It was obvious he was a person of intense integrity. He could be funny and sly, but he cared about what was true. He didn't make his jokes at someone else's expense. If he was going to ask a sharp question, it was to awaken someone's conscience. All of that was the right ordering of values: being virtuous on top, and then lots of those other real but lesser virtues — like sense of humor, cleverness in a debate group, gaudiness — were all subservient to that first virtue. The whole time I was dating, I looked for people who had something weird going on the side. In his case, it was several different things. But when I first got interested, was when I found out he had adapted The Man Who Was Thursday into a stage play.

The Path to Parenthood and Community

Ruiz: I haven't talked with many interviewees about their paths into parenthood, specifically. You've written very straightforwardly about yours. You wrote that, "In the [first] four years of my marriage, my husband and I have welcomed seven children, and mourned as only one of them, Beatrice, made it safely through the first trimester into birth." 

You also quote Susan Sontag: "Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place." What did that continue to teach you about how a household and how marriage works?

Sargeant: You can't divorce loving someone from being in the hardest places with them. You think, "Something terrible is happening. Is there any way it could happen to just me?" Part of what marriage is means that will never, ever happen. There are parts of a miscarriage that happen bodily only to the mother. But there's no way for the suffering not to be shared.

Ruiz: You live in Hyattsville, in a community of a lot of large Catholic families, some might call it an 'intentional community.' You've written about living in community in your book Building the Benedict Option. How did you make the decision to commit to living with these people? And even bottoming out, potentially, and suffering with them.

Sargeant: Let me touch on that last part first. One of the things I'm so grateful for, and found attractive from the start, was learning that moms would get together once a week to say the Rosary together. You get together with people—at the drop-off line, or someone you hang out with—and say, "What should we offer this Rosary for?" And you hear everything.

When I host it on Monday and we're chatting, hanging out, sharing parenting tips, it's, "All right, what should we pray for?" That's when I hear about four or five miscarriages in a row—not all from people in the room, but people in their lives recently. You get this real intimacy from a community rooted in prayer, because people know prayer can be an answer to any of these moments. You don't get the sense of, "I can't bring this up because no one can help or fix it."

Why I moved here—when I converted, I was in contact with the wonderful Dominican priest and bluegrass musician, Father Thomas Joseph White. He said, "I'm going to pick your parish, and I'm going to pick a friend for you at the parish." Both of which worked out great. A number of folks from that parish started moving to Hyattsville as they had kids. I was visiting a friend in Hyattsville who was also an alum of my debate society. It was a snowy day. Their kids got all bundled up in snowsuits, and they all looked like big ambulatory starfish, bobbling out the door. After a bit, snowsuit kids started bobbling back. It takes me a minute—"These are different kids." The idea that in your neighborhood you just release your kids unsupervised, they find kids, they bring them back without asking permission, they're like, "Our parents will make cocoa for all of us"—I was like, "That's what I want." I'd been plotting to move to Hyattsville since before I started dating my husband. I just didn't know with whom I would be moving.

Dating Like a Venture Capitalist

Ruiz: Most of the decline in marriage and birth rates seems to be downstream of people pairing off later in life and having more difficulty finding that partner. What suggestions do you have here?

Sargeant: What I think would help the most but isn’t going to happen—the government seizes and shuts down all dating apps. Even when they're not themselves actively terrible, they put this infinite choice in front of you, and create a way of meeting strangers that cannibalizes one of the better ways of meeting people: through your networks of friends. Because it's easier and more frictionless to get started there, it competes with something that's more likely to help you find people you're compatible with. Getting rid of the competition opens up the chance that people will do the harder, better thing.

In the absence of that, the advice I give people is: if you are doing the apps, you've got to treat it like you are a venture capitalist. You're trying to make a lot of bets, most of which won't pan out, and if you can find one person you want to marry, that pays for everything. Because that is forever; you are trying to match with the person you actually want to marry. Going on third dates with people you find inoffensive but do not want to marry is wasting your time and theirs. My advice was to have a high-variance approach to dating where you are never playing generically to try and get a second date. You are trying to get a second date conditional on it being very likely you'll have a tenth date.

[I]f you are doing the [dating] apps, you've got to treat it like you are a venture capitalist.

Ruiz: I think you had similar advice in the interview Ben Christenson did with you about hosting: you want a particular enough event to narrow to the group of people…

Sargeant: Yes—the people who strongly want to come, or don't want to come. Rather than, "I guess it would be fine." I definitely went on dates with guys who were being blandly inoffensive, trying to do nothing that compromised a second date. But many of those guys, if they thought about it, would not be happy married to me. My job was helping them figure that out early.

Ruiz: Is that your individual approach as well?

Sargeant: I have to think, "I'm going on dates in order to get married." Dates that are pleasant. but not great, are not worth prolonging. For individuals looking, and for people trying to support them, think about what events help people notice they admire each other, rather than just find it pleasant to be around. Networking events with cheese and wine are not good for this. Weird philosophical debates that go to 2 am—they're great for it. Running events that are more like book clubs, or movie nights with a big discussion afterwards of a movie that's weird or challenging, like Company or Passion—to pick things I have done—are better for this. You're trying to think about how people can be around each other in ways that'll make them notice, "Ooh, that person."

Life in the Third Oikos

Ruiz: Do you have any recipes for preserving intentional time for you and your spouse, especially with an eye towards technology's creep into your home?

Sargeant: We put our TV in the basement. Our basement is usually locked. Watching the TV—for grown-ups or kids—is always a deliberate choice. The main way we watch anything with kids is with DVDs, so you are picking a particular thing. When we want something shorter we watch NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts, after screening for language. The thing I dislike most about media made for children is when they don't trust that children want to give their attention to something. Everything's fast cuts and high activity. The Tiny Desk Concerts are real people playing straight through.

I've tried some of the tech things people say, like the black-and-white screen. It doesn't make a big difference for me, because most of what I do on my phone is text-based anyway—looking at my RSS reader or Twitter. I try and have as few things send notifications to my phone as possible. But I think it's mostly about having compelling alternatives. Lots of good books on Kindle from the library, going for walks, I get the New York Times on paper on Sundays. I text my mom, who's also reading it, about what she's reading—one of the big things is things that are shared as reading experiences, versus things that are solitary. I built, using Claude Code, an extension for my web browser that delays Twitter when I open it. It's delayed by about 20 seconds, and I see a prayer request. By the end of the 20 seconds, I'm free to either decide yes, I do want to see Twitter, or no, I don't. Either way, I've had the invitation to pray first.

We need to think through what gets us to the point where the benefits of flexibility at work translate to flexibility at home.

Ruiz: You've mentioned [in the full interview] all of the calendar work you do to decide what to accomplish. How do you decide what gets the yes, especially between you and your husband?

Sargeant: I Boomerang emails to 8 pm the next night whenever something requires both of us to decide. That could be anything from, "How are we going to handle this volunteer opportunity at school?" to, "I've received this speaking invitation to Berlin." At 8 pm, I look at the list. I say, "Let's talk about logistics tonight. I've got eight things here. We're very tired, so let's do these three that have to be answered, and soon you will hear about the rest." Which I assume is charming and exciting. That makes it easy to do that triage in the moment.

We both do some of each, but to a first approximation, I do bits and Alexi does atoms. He takes out the trash and packs the lunches. I'm like, "I have paid our taxes. I've contested this bill. I have four things lined up logistically."

Ruiz: This is a territory Third Oikos has not yet delved into—the bits-versus-atoms household works. I like it.

Sargeant: It's great when you and your spouse have different tastes in tasks. Not only are you doing something that's good for the household, but you're getting these real gains from trade. I hate taking out the trash. Not only is my husband stronger, I am way more grossed out by the prospect that it will drip on me. My husband—it's not that he's constantly mastering the disgust I feel. He's just, "I'm taking out the trash." In the same way, when I file our taxes, I don't think, "I hate this." You should not assume the tasks you find most aversive are the most aversive for your spouse. Think of it as thrilling—you're getting away with something — when you find out we hate different tasks. Let me do as many of the tasks that you hate as possible and vice versa.

Harold Bloom says the marriage he's most confident in all of Shakespeare is Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. He feels they are united in a conspiracy against the world. That sense of marriage as a shared scheme, I find very enlivening.

Ruiz: One of the core theses of this publication is that our post-industrial society—the Third Oikos, the imagination of this post-AI, post-digital-technology society—will enable production to move back into the home. I believe we’re at the cusp of this transition, so I also believe we have the power to shape it. What excites you about the next era of technology? What are the particular dangers to personhood and how we see our humanity?

Sargeant: I’m more bearish on how close we are to the Third Oikos, though I like some of the possibilities. Because it’s about more flexibility—not just you can do things from home. It’s actually very challenging to integrate my work, which is slightly more flexible, with my child care, which is very inflexible. I’m currently three days a week in the office and two days a week with no commute. That’s not the same as having wildly different child care schedules on different days.

We need to think through, what gets us to the point where the benefits of flexibility at work translate to flexibility at home. I get a partial benefit, and I’m grateful for it. But it’s not the same as having one day a week where my kids can be home and not go to preschool. On the days I’m working from home, I can start a sourdough in the morning, and no one at the office cares that I’m doing turns of the dough in between meetings. That’s great, but it’s not as central as what I want to do with my kids.

Editor’s Note: This interview series is made possible by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies. This interview is condensed from a two-part series that was first published on The Third Oikos Substack. 

*Photo credit: Shutterstock