An intellectual yenta. That’s what Leah Libresco Sargeant said when I asked her how she understands her vocation.
Properly speaking, yenta is Yiddish for a gossip or busybody—and maybe she sees some of that in herself, too—but some people use it to mean “connector,” and that’s what she is. Over the last fifteen years, Sargeant, an increasingly prominent Catholic intellectual, has been employed as a data journalist, a policy wonk, a university chaplain, and a head of HR, with stints at an effective altruism start-up and at Braver Angels, an organization that stages cross-partisan public debates. In a word, she’s always on the move. Her work life appears itinerant and diffuse because it is.
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