The new issue (Summer 06) of Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture is now available. If you haven’t seen this journal, check it out: it’s new, so ask your school library to pick it up. Editor Paul Louis Metzger and his team bring together articles that carry on “a biblically informed, Christ-centered trinitarian engagement of contemporary culture.” As a contributing editor, I’ll be writing articles and book reviews for it from time to time.

The current issue publishes my article “Don Giovanni: The Absolute Man and the Patience of God,” which is a theological interpretation of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Here are the first couple of pages, which set up the problem posed by the opera:

Something strange, and theologically significant, happens when you listen to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The peculiar phenomenon I have in mind has been reported by ordinary music lovers as well as by some of the most insightful critics ever to ponder the work of Mozart. What happens is this: Don Giovanni performs despicable acts of exploitation, seduction, and violence right before our eyes, and we enjoy every minute of it. It is not that we, the audience, are tricked into approving of the actions. They remain loathsome in themselves, and we are never invited to think of the Don as anything but a rogue. Nor is it that we merely anticipate with relish the final judgment which we know awaits the Don, with its reassertion of moral equilibrium: “This is the end which befalls evildoers, and in this life, scoundrels always receive their just deserts.” Either of these possibilities might explain how we could be pleased by watching the actions of a villain, but neither of them is quite as singular as what occurs in Don Giovanni. The pleasure delivered by this opera is something else, something unique and central to this work so frequently hailed as “the perfect opera.”
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