Mozart's operatic masterpiece Don Giovanni raises pivotal questions about freedom and society: should freedom be without constraints? Is absolute freedom possible? In certain key ways these concerns of Mozart's culture resonate with issues that preoccupy us today. Composed in 1787, during the final years of the liberal regime introduced by the Habsburg emperor Joseph II, the opera reflects the shadow side of his “enlightened” reforms. The serial seducer Don Giovanni represents a liberty that has degenerated into libertinism. The freedom that Don Giovanni wants to retain at all costs is merely freedom as the absence of physical constraint. In the contemporary world many people aspire to a similarly riven freedom: they reject the dictates of external authority, and docilely submit to the promptings of instinctual drives. Christianity invites human beings to reach beyond themselves in love. Marriage exemplifies the self-giving of permanent commitment, and contrasts starkly with Don Giovanni's egoistic consumption and hasty disposal of women. Although the lyrics and plot of Mozart's opera never evoke the Trinity, the musical perfection of his work dances on the threshold of Revelation, and opens its hearers up to the liberating mystery of the freedom of Trinitarian love.

Employing several major lines of argument, I claim that Augustine exhibits styles of thought, literary methods and modes of inquiry that are not only accessible to feminist scholarship, but that are genuinely feminist‐friendly. I first examine the Confessions, and then proceed with analyses of Augustine's style, a comparison of his work to that of another major thinker in the Christian tradition, an analysis of his use of the notion of unity, and a final look at City of God. The work of commentators such as Chadwick, Clark, McMahon and Mallard is used in order to support the argument. Augustine's standing as one of the founding Church Fathers may make it difficult for us to mention him in the same breath as the concept of “feminism.”1 Yet in our attempts to try to come to grips with thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Quine, we have frequently noticed that concepts useful to feminists are where one finds them.

The reception of Greek learning in mediaeval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity was the occasion for a profound analysis of many theological doctrines. In particular, Neoplatonism and Aristotelian philosophy led to renewed thinking about what it means for God to be the Creator of all that is. In the Latin West, Thomas Aquinas benefited from the works of Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides as he fashioned his understanding of creation, understood both philosophically and theologically. The recognition that creation is not a change and as a metaphysical dependence in the order of being does not challenge claims in the natural sciences (e.g., that something cannot come from absolutely nothing) are crucial features of the mediaeval heritage on the relationship between creation and the natural sciences. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas argued that an eternal, created universe was intelligible.

This essay questions the theological position developed by Stanley Hauerwas over three decades. It first traces the origins of his thought, and argues that the alliance of radical Reformation ecclesiology with postmodern philosophy leads to an intensely idealistic ecclesiology. Hauerwas's exaltation of particular communal practices is ultimately unreal, as he fails to locate these practices in a particular institution. Due to the unreality of his ecclesiology his attack on Christendom and Constantinianism lacks substance. In the end he undermines his own position by identifying the truth of Christianity with the concrete practices of a distinctive community that he cannot identify.

Jean‐Luc Marion's work has received plenty of critical attention in recent years. This paper returns to the core of Marion's project in a rather different way from many of the previous critiques by focussing on two troubling aspects of his work. Firstly, the way in which Marion conceives the relationship between phenomenology and theology is explored in the hope that Marion's missteps might illuminate the ongoing problem of the relationship between philosophy and theology; secondly, the major methodological move which Marion makes, that of linking givenness to phenomenological reduction, is critically examined. This latter critique is the main purpose of the paper, since it is apparent that the role which reduction plays in Marion's phenomenology, when seen under the rubric of a philosophical practice, also indicates one possible route towards the clarification of the first problem, that of the relationship between philosophy and theology.

We no longer believe that the mind is a blank slate that simply records sense‐data as given. Over the last two centuries, we have become increasingly aware of the fact that we bring something to what is given to us in experience. It is what we bring to our experience in the form of our conceptual perspective that molds and shapes our understanding or interpretation of the experience. This is especially true of religious experience. What is given in our God experiences is from God, but our interpretive understanding and reaction to our God experiences are uniquely our own. This paper considers several aspects of religious experience from such a phenomenal perspective.