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The resources of the household are indeed limited, and the steward does indeed have to make decisions about how to distribute them, but such matters do not mark him as a “sovereign self” but rather the opposite: a person embedded in a social and familial context within which he has serious responsibilities.
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If we conceive of attention as simply the activity of a willful agent, we foreclose the possibility of being arrested or brought to attention by something fully outside ourselves. We foreclose, for example,the possibility of an ecstatic attention and the possibility that we can be brought to attention by a particular thing beyond our will, a source beyond our own purposeful, willful action.
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Alan Jacobs has written seventy-nine theses on technology for disputation. A disputation is an old technology, a formal technique of debate and argument that took shape in medieval universities in Paris, Bologna, and Oxford in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In its most general form, a disputation consisted of a thesis, a counter thesis, and a string of arguments, usually buttressed by citations of Aristotle, Augustine, or the Bible.
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Noteworthy reads from the last week.
The renovated Place de la République shows the power of the public square.
Steven Smith’s newest book expresses greater pessimism about the current trajectory of religious freedom in America. But he may not be pessimistic enough.