Leah 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.
This is part one of a two-part interview. In part one, we talk about how Leah’s household was formed and how it runs: conversion, marriage, grief, community, and how to keep your marriage a conspiracy against the world.
Losing a Long Argument
N: I would love to hear where you grew up and how you were raised.
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.
N: What were some of the formative moments that changed your path?
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.
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.
N: Was this at the same moment that you met your husband?
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.
N: I did not realize that it wasn’t an on-campus meeting.
We belonged to a group that’s got this institutional heft — you can meet alumni from very different generations. It would be like, “We have the following 15 things in common right away. I didn’t overlap with you, but I’ve heard people give detailed histories of the grudges and factions of your periods.”
N: 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?
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.
No Way for the Suffering Not to Be Shared
N: 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?
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.
N: You also talk about your father entering into hospice. You wrote in Deseret that, “It was my [then unmarried] brother who could do the most for him and my mother, while I was limited in my ability to help, with responsibilities to my toddler, and was hampered by the needs of her little sister growing in my belly.” I’m so sorry about the whole situation. How did that care shape your view of the household, of what it means to love someone and your views about dependence?
I’ve grown away from a very meritocratic idea that loving people is being very successful, and doing and fixing things, which is sometimes a form love can take — versus love often will bottom out as “suffering with.” You will have to learn how to be present when solutions run out. None of that devalues solutions. I fix a lot of things day to day. But I think of all that as — that’s the thing that’s passing: the compassion, the suffering with, is the bedrock.
Whether We Like Those People or Not, They’re Ours
N: 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.
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 — not all from people in the room, but people in their lives — recently, in a row. 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.
N: When did it start? I didn’t realize it had such extensive roots.
There’s been a parish and families here for a long time. Revitalizing the school happened because of a crisis—in 2009 the parish school was put on the closure list, and every other school on the list ultimately closed except ours. They overhauled the whole school to make it genuinely attractive to the Catholic families already living here.
N: You said, in Building the Benedict Option, that there must be some way to make it easier to ask things of each other. We benefit both from the immediate effects of the help we ask for, but also from making our neediness nakedly visible. When I talked to Andy Crouch about this, he said: ‘The first thing you can do to enter into community is say, “I have a problem.”
What are some of the tools you’re using in Hyattsville to make those needs visible to the people around you?
Our parish has two unofficial listservs — one for men, one for women — run by people in the community, where people post prayer requests, meal trains go out for parents who have kids, and people explain how to sign up for summer camp. We’re using it to pull together our Magnifica Humanitas book club. Because it’s very active, you never really have to pause and go, “Can I send a prayer request? Can I ask if someone can help me assemble this bunk bed?” We had two different dads here the day we moved in — one was helping us install gates so that our kids would be safe; the other was fixing the door.
The next morning after our move, we go to church for the first time. Someone says, “Are you coming to the Shakespeare play next weekend? The high-school girls have formed a self-organizing troupe, with no adults involved, to do an all-female Shakespeare production on someone’s wraparound porch.” We’re like, “Of course we’re coming.”
N: How does the meal train work?
If you have a baby, you are guaranteed twelve meals from the community. Folks will put together a meal train on the listserv, and if it’s not getting filled up, the admins will hassle people to make sure it happens. It’s a huge gift. Until I moved here, my meal trains were mostly from friends. This is the only place I’ve lived in which my meals can be from strangers. I meet them, and meet them again when I finally return their Tupperware four months later. I like that I’m being cared for corporately by my parish rather than just personally by my friends. I like our new parish priest on this front too. One of the things he did recently was organize a walk around our parish boundaries so people could pray as we walked — and know that we are responsible. All of us are responsible for everyone inside these boundaries. Whether we like those people or not, they’re ours.
Dating Like a Venture Capitalist
N: 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?
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 dates 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.
N: 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…
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.
N: Is that your individual approach as well?
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.”
A Ten-Minute Timer and a Gold Star Chart
N: I want to shift to your household specifically. Will you walk me through a day in your life? I’m curious what family rituals make your household run smoothly.
We wake up probably before the kids. We say a morning prayer, then my four-and-a-half-year-old turns up in the bed to snuggle me. I load them all into my cargo trike and bike them about ten minutes to school, come back home, and drop off my son with the nanny. [NB: since our chat, my son has started preschool at the parish, and now I work on the ground floor near windows during the day—Leah]
On a home day, I sneak into the basement to work. I’ll try and take a time where I sneak out, if the weather is nice. I usually run into someone I know and I walk by the playground where my kids are playing if I go by during recess. That’s all very nice — just feeling strongly connected to my neighborhood during the day.
Around 4:30, I relieve the nanny. The ideal scenario is my husband takes our son to do school pickup and I use that time to get things at least partway cooked. Once we all sit down for dinner, we say grace, then flip over a ten-minute timer. During the timer, you can’t ask for anything new. We don’t have the rule where you have to eat what we made — but we have given you an alternative already. That way, there’s ten minutes where everyone, especially the grown-ups, can sit at the table and eat. During that period, we ask everyone to name something they’re grateful for from the day.
Usually my husband and I do bedtime together. Our oldest, who’s six and a half, is reading chapter books in her bed. The two youngest kids squabble over laps and books. Then we pray, tuck people into their sleeping bags and hug their backs. We remind them that if they come out of the room after the door closes, they will not get a gold star on the chart. We hear feet mysteriously upstairs. But we don’t ask any questions, we don’t have a video monitor, and if no one comes out of the room, it’s still a star. On Sunday, you get ice cream, and a certain number of toppings that are related to how many big gold stars you have.
We mark one quiet night — currently every other week — where we spend time together reading, or watching a movie. We finish the night with prayer for the people we care about, then pass out.
N: You hit on so many of the things I was going to ask for tips about. We might start implementing the timer tip.
The reason we did it was we’d ask people how their days were, and our oldest would give a litany of grievances, and that’s not what we wanted to hear about. We had to narrow the question.
N: I’m curious how you deal with house cleaning and maintenance.
We ask for help when anything involves equipment or expertise we don’t possess. I have that big cargo trike and we wanted a ground-anchored, tamper-resistant bike lockup point. We posted, “Who in the neighborhood on the men’s listserv has a hammer drill?” Someone was like, “I love using my hammer drill.”
For periodic maintenance, I use Boomerang, which is a system of getting emails to return to your inbox. Every two months I get an email that says “Clean the garbage disposal.” It turns up. Maybe I’m traveling to speak; then I Boomerang it two more days. Then I’m like, “Today is the day.” I clean it, and Boomerang it for six weeks. February is the one time a year we pay a gardener to come and clean up after the winter. I get the reminder, schedule it, ping it back for next year, and don’t think about it again.
I have a lower standard for household cleanliness than some people:
Do we sweep up after meals because kids drop Cheerios on the floor? Yes.
Do we mop regularly, at all? No.
Twice a year-ish, do I hire someone to do a deep clean where they genuinely mop all the floors? Yes.
Do most people think the amount of time you should mop your floors is twice a year? No.
Do people who come to my house know I only mop my floor twice a year? Not unless they spill water and clean it up with a paper towel and go, “This is a surprisingly dirty paper towel.” So I’m getting away with it.
I throw out a lot of stuff whenever I can get away with it. Anything where I’m like, “I hate picking this up all the time,” gets hidden in the basement for a month, and if we get away with it, it gets thrown out.
N: That’s a good one. I’m nervous as the kids get older — Rafa’s memory has started getting longer already, and two months later he’s asking, “Where’s the plastic bracelet I got?” I’m like, “It might be in the trash.”
A fun thing is you can always answer honestly, “I don’t know,” because once you’ve put it in the trash, you don’t know where it is.
Life in the Third Oikos
N: Do you have any other recipes for preserving intentional time for you and your spouse, especially with an eye towards technology’s creep into your home?
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.
N: You’ve mentioned all the calendar work you do to decide what to accomplish. How do you decide what gets the yes, especially between you and your husband?
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.”
N: This is a territory Third Oikos has not yet delved into — the bits-versus-atoms household split. I like it.
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.
In part two: Leah’s random walk across careers, negotiating for slack, why she’s bearish on how close we are to the Third Oikos, and who you are when a computer is better at your doing.
This interview series is made possible by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies.
Thank you to Harry Fletcher Wood for his edits.
I have to mention that I tried the timer during dinner to keep my 3.5yo at the table and it worked really well, so thank you for that!
(I know there’s a lot more substance here, but this small concrete takeaway made our life a little better.)
Beautiful!