Kathryn Tanner

Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Which World?". The sixth lecture in the series discusses how finance-dominated capitalism encourages one to relate to oneself, which in turn has a bearing on the understanding of one’s relations with others. It will consider the emphasis on individual performance and responsibility in finance-dominated capitalism, the specific forms of competition typical of wage relations and market dynamics, winner-take-all profit mechanisms and herd behaviour in financial markets, privatising tendencies in the provision of public goods and the shifting of risks on to vulnerable individuals. It will contrast these emphases with the general ways that Christianity links one’s relationship with oneself to one’s relations with others. Recorded 12 May 2016 at the University of Edinburgh's Business School auditorium.

Prof. Kathryn Tanner - Which World?

Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Another World?". The fifth lecture in the series explores how present and future are collapsed in the evaluation of assets on secondary financial markets, and the way efforts are made, by way of derivatives and other tactics typical of finance-dominated capitalism, to limit the potentially disturbing character of an unpredictable future. The lecture will seek to establish how Christianity, to the contrary, allows for a future that, while very different from the present, does not simply compensate for the present’s failings. Recorded 10 May 2016 at the University of Edinburgh's Business School auditorium.

Prof. Kathryn Tanner - Another World?

Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Nothing but the Present". The fourth lecture in the series investigates the causes and consequences of a preoccupation with the present in the lives of both workers and the indebted poor, and of the short-term time horizons that are characteristic of finance-dominated capitalism. It will lay out the different reasons for Christian attention to an urgent present, along with the different effects of the Christian understanding of the present. Recorded 9 May 2016 at the University of Edinburgh's Business School auditorium.

Prof. Kathryn Tanner - Nothing but the Present

Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Total Commitment". The third lecture in the series explores the strategies used in finance-dominated capitalism to ensure worker compliance with company demands. It will contrast these strategies, point by point, with the way in which a person’s commitment to God is related to the person’s more mundane commitments. Recorded 5 May 2016 at the University of Edinburgh's Business School auditorium.

Prof. Kathryn Tanner - Total Commitment

Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Chained to the Past". The second lecture in the series considers the way in which persons, as both workers and debtors, are encouraged to relate to past decisions that constrain present action within finance-dominated capitalism. The presumed inevitability of this way of relating to the past is undercut by appealing to Christian forms of self-repudiation in conversion and to the ruptured narratives that go along with them. Recorded 3 May 2016 at the University of Edinburgh's George Square Lecture Theatre.

Prof. Kathryn Tanner - Chained to the Past

Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism". The first lecture in this series discusses the Weberian approach to the influence of Christian beliefs and practices on economic behaviour, and ties it to the sort of comparison of ‘spiritualities’ offered by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his Collège de France lectures. The lecture explores the general characteristics of finance-dominated capitalism and its culture, and outlines the basic shape of the larger argument of the series, concerning the potential for Christianity to counteract contemporary capitalist modes of control. Recorded 2 May 2016 at the University of Edinburgh's Business School.

Prof. Kathryn Tanner - Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism

Jeremy Waldron

Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the sixth in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "Hard and Heart-breaking Cases: The Profoundly Disabled As Our Human Equals". In this lecture, Professor Waldron explores ways of thinking about these aspects of the human condition that allow us to maintain the integrity of basic human equality. Recorded on 5 February 2015 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library.

Prof. Jeremy Waldron - Hard and Heart-breaking Cases: The Profoundly Disabled As Our Human Equals

Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the fifth in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "Human Dignity and Our Relation to God". In this lecture Professor Waldron will relate our intimations about a transcendent basis for human equality to the work that was done in the previous lectures about the basic logic of the position. Recorded on 3 February 2015 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library

Prof. Jeremy Waldron - Human Dignity and Our Relation to God

Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the fourth in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "A Load-bearing Idea: The Work of Human Equality". Defending basic equality is not just a matter of ‘coming up with’ some suitably shaped property that all humans share. The description must be relevant to the work that basic equality has to do. That work is comprehensive and foundational, across all aspects of morality. Recorded on 2 February 2015 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library.

Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the fourth in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "A Load-bearing Idea: The Work of Human Equality". Defending basic equality is not just a matter of ‘coming up with’ some suitably shaped property that all humans share. The description must be relevant to the work that basic equality has to do. That work is comprehensive and foundational, across all aspects of morality. Recorded on 2 February 2015 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library.

Prof. Jeremy Waldron - A Load-bearing Idea: The Work of Human Equality

For over a century, the Gifford Lectures have enabled international scholars to contribute to the advancement of theological and philosophical thought. The Gifford Lectureships, which are held at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and St. Andrews, were established under the will of Adam Lord Gifford, a Senator of the College of Justice, who died in 1887. The 2012 Edinburgh Gifford lectures is a series of six lectures delivered by Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, The University of Oxford.

Gifford Lectures (audio)

Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the third in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "Looking for a Range Property: Hobbes, Kant, and Rawls". In 'A Theory of Justice' Rawls introduced the idea of a 'range property' - a sort of threshold-based approach to the significance of variations in a certain range. Professor Waldron explores this idea, which Hobbes and Kant also implicitly relied on. Recorded on 29 January 2015 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library.

Prof. Jeremy Waldron - Looking for a Range Property: Hobbes, Kant, and Rawls

Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the second in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "Everyone To Count For One - The Logic of Basic Equality".In this lecture, Professor Waldron will distinguish basic equality from various normative positions - both egalitarian and non-egalitarian - that are built up on it. Professor Waldron will seek to make sense of Jeremy Bentham’s maxim. That maxim, 'Everyone to count for one', is tantalizingly close to tautological: for what exactly does 'no one [counts] for more than one' rule out? And is basic equality just a negative position, denying significance to certain kinds of descriptive inequality? Or is it an affirmative position based on the positive significance of certain descriptive properties? Recorded on 27 January 2015 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library.

Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the second in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "Everyone To Count For One - The Logic of Basic Equality". In this lecture, Professor Waldron will distinguish basic equality from various normative positions - both egalitarian and non-egalitarian - that are built up on it. Professor Waldron will seek to make sense of Jeremy Bentham’s maxim. That maxim, 'Everyone to count for one', is tantalizingly close to tautological: for what exactly does 'no one [counts] for more than one' rule out? And is basic equality just a negative position, denying significance to certain kinds of descriptive inequality? Or is it an affirmative position based on the positive significance of certain descriptive properties? Recorded on 27 January 2015 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library.

Prof. Jeremy Waldron - Everyone To Count For One

Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the first in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "More Than Merely Equal Consideration, - the Rev. Hastings Rashdall"In 1907, an Anglican clergyman teaching at New College, Oxford elaborated a theory of human inequality in Volume 1 of his book, The Theory of Good and Evil: A Treatise on Moral Philosophy.Hastings’ theory is highly offensive to modern ears: for it is a form of philosophical racism.But we will examine it — first, because it gives us a very clear picture of the position that basic equality has to deny; and second, because it hints at insidious ways in which rejections of basic equality might be revived.Recorded on 26 January 2015 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library.

Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the first in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "More Than Merely Equal Consideration, - the Rev. Hastings Rashdall" In 1907, an Anglican clergyman teaching at New College, Oxford elaborated a theory of human inequality in Volume 1 of his book, The Theory of Good and Evil: A Treatise on Moral Philosophy. Hastings’ theory is highly offensive to modern ears: for it is a form of philosophical racism. But we will examine it — first, because it gives us a very clear picture of the position that basic equality has to deny; and second, because it hints at insidious ways in which rejections of basic equality might be revived. Recorded on 26 January 2015 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library.

Prof. Jeremy Waldron - More Than Merely Equal Consideration

Justice Catherine O’Regan, former judge to the South African Constitutional Court and chairperson of the United Nations Internal Justice Council, delivers the University of Edinburgh's 2014 Gifford Lecture. Courts in constitutional democracies face tough questions in developing a principled jurisprudence for the adjudication of claims based on faith. This lecture considers some of the recent jurisprudence from Europe, North America, India and South Africa and discuss key questions including whether it is possible to identify a principled basis for the adjudication of claims based on faith, whether cross-jurisdictional learning is possible and proper and whether different social, political and religious contexts should and do make a difference to answering these questions. This lecture was recorded on Monday 19 May, at the University of Edinburgh's St Cecilia's Hall.

Justice Catherine O'Regan - 'What is Caesar's?' Adjudicating Faith in Modern Constitutional Democracies

Lord Williams

Lord Rowan Williams of Oystermouth delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Making Representations: Religious Faith and the Habits of Language". Lecture 6: Can Truth be Spoken? In what sense can we legitimately think about silence as a mode of knowing? We need to be cautious about using such a notion as an excuse for giving up the challenges of truthful speech. But it is true that, if what is ultimately most important is to be attuned to the reality that we invite to 'inhabit' us, silence may be the most appropriate means of representation. The challenge is to frame silence in order to render it meaningful; that is, as more than an absence of sound or concept. And to identify such deliberate and 'strategic' silence - in meditation, in music, but also in aspects of our habitual discourse - is to raise the question of how silence 'refers' and so puts all we say in a new, and questioning, light. Recorded on 14 November 2013 at the University of Edinburgh's New College.

Lord Williams of Oystermouth - Can Truth be Spoken?

Steven Pinker

Professor Steven Pinker delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity". Contrary to the popular impression view that we are living in extraordinarily violent times, rates of violence at all scales have been in decline over the course of history. This lecture explores how this decline could have happened despite the existence of a constant human nature. Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on language and cognition, which has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the American Psychological Association, and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.Recorded on Wednesday 29 May 2013 at McEwan Hall, the University of Edinburgh.

Professor Steven Pinker - The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

Professor Bruno Latour delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion". Lecture 6: Inside the 'Planetary Boundaries': Gaia's Estate Although the resources of "paganism", New Age cults, renewed themes of Christian incarnation, and process theology offer rich mythological insights, it is not clear whether they are at the scale and sensitivity needed to face Gaia. A search for collective rituals should begin with works of art and experiments able to explore in sufficient detail the scientific and political composition of the common world. Recorded on Thursday 28 February 2013 at St Cecilia's Hall, the University of Edinburgh.

Prof Bruno Latour - Inside the 'Planetary Boundaries': Gaia's Estate

Professor Bruno Latour delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion". Lecture 4: The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe The paradox of what is called "globalization" is that there is no "global globe" to hold the multitude of concerns that have to be assembled to replace the "politics of nature" of former periods. What are the instruments —always local and partial— that are sensitive enough to Gaia's components for the limited technical and emotional apparatus of assembled humans? Recorded on Monday 25 February 2013 at St Cecilia's Hall, the University of Edinburgh.

Prof Bruno Latour - The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe

David Hume

Professor Bruno Latour delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion". Lecture 2: A Shift in Agency - with apologies to David Hume Once nature and the natural sciences are fully ''secularized'', it becomes possible to revisit also the category of the supernatural. Then, a different landscape opens which can be navigated through an attention to agencies and their composition. Such a freedom of movement allows the use of the rich anthropological literature to compare the ways different "collectives" manage to assemble and totalize different sets of agencies. Recorded on Tuesday 19 February 2013 at St Cecilia's Hall, the University of Edinburgh.

Prof Bruno Latour - A Shift in Agency - with apologies to David Hume

Professor Bruno Latour delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion". Lecture 1: 'Once Out of Nature' - Natural Religion as a Pleonasm The set of questions around the two words "natural religion" implies that only the second word is a coded and thus a disputed category, the first one being taken for granted and uncoded. But if it can be shown that the very notion of nature is a theological construct, we might be able to shift the problem somewhat: the question becomes not to save or resurrect "natural religion", but to dispose of it by offering at last a ''secular'' version of nature and of the natural sciences. Recorded on Monday 18 February 2013 at St Cecilia's Hall, the University of Edinburgh.

Prof Bruno Latour - 'Once Out of Nature' - Natural Religion as a Pleonasm

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Lecture 5: Getting behind noise in Christian history So far, the story has largely been about overt history: the positive utterances and actions of public Christianity. We turn now to further and more complex varieties of silence: first the phenomenon of ‘Nicodemism’, simultaneously audible to those with ears to hear, and not to be heard by others. New politic silences were caused by the fissuring of Western Christianity, through efforts to sidestep the consequent violence and persecution; a rediscovery of classical discussion of silence took place on the eve of the Reformation in the writings of Italian civic humanists, and this tradition fused with the debate about Nicodemism and the place of quiet versus overt toleration. Over the centuries, particular groups who represented the ‘Other’, some Christian, some not, have made themselves invisible simply in order to survive: crypto-Judaism and its effect on Christianity are discussed, together with examples of Christian Nicodemism, notably the Reformation ‘Family of Love’ and the growth of a distinctive gay sub-culture within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-Catholicism. We move to those things best left unsaid in order to build identity in Christian organisations and newly-evangelised regions, and the way in which themes and dogmatic position once considered vital and central for the Christian life have been quietly abandoned without much acknowledgement of their one-time importance. We scrutinise Christian problems in dealing honestly with sexuality, with a specific example. Finally we turn to the confused reaction of Churches to shame over past sin, the example being complicity in the slave trade. Recorded Tuesday 1 May 2012 at St Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh. Audio version.

Diarmaid MacCulloch - Getting behind noise in Christian history

Lecture 6: Silence in modern and future Christianities We consider the democratisation of the quest for silence in industrial society: the tangling of a secular society with the silences provided by Christian tradition, through for instance the popularity of retreats, or the observance of silence in remembrance. We see the importance of ‘whistle-blowing’ to modern Christianity, and its use of the historical discipline. We ponder the relation of agnosticism to silence; the role of music in silence and Christian understanding; the relationship between Word and Spirit in the future of Christian life. Recorded Thursday 3 May 2012 at St Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh.Audio version. Listen to podcast

Diarmaid MacCulloch - Silence in modern and future Christianities

Lecture 3: Silence through schism and two Reformations: 451-1500 The significance of the threeway split in Christianity after the Council of Chalcedon (451). The purposeful Chalcedonian forgetting of Evagrius Ponticus and the contribution of an anonymous theologian who took the name Dionysius the Areopagite. The role of Augustine in the Western Church: a theologian of words, not silence. The transformation in the use of silence and its function after the Carolingian expansion of Benedictine monastic life (together with the West’s discovery of pseudo-Dionysius), and the further development through the great years of Cluny Abbey. Counter-currents on silence in the medieval West, and the significance of the Iconoclastic controversy, and later hesychasm, in the Byzantine world. Tensions between clerical and lay spirituality in the late medieval West. Recorded 26 April 2012 at St Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh. Audio version.

Diarmaid MacCulloch - Silence through schism and two Reformations: 451-1500

Lecture 4: Silence transformed: the third Reformation 1500-1700 The noisiness of Protestantism, particularly exacerbated by the end of monasticism, unsuccessfully countered in the Church of Zürich but transcended first among radical Reformers (especially Caspar Schwenckfeld and Sebastian Franck) and a century later by the Society of Friends. The difficulties of contemplatives in the Counter-Reformation, where activism was the characteristic of the new foundations of Jesuits and Ursulines, and the problems faced by such revivals as the Discalced Carmelites. The troubles of Madame Guyon and Quietists. Recorded 30 April 2012 at St Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh. Audio version.

Diarmaid MacCulloch - Silence transformed: the third Reformation 1500-1700

Lecture 2: Catholic Christianity and the arrival of ascetism, 100-400 Counter-strands to silence in the early Church, encouraged by its congregational worship and cult of martyrdom, and the effect of gnostic Christianities in shaping what the emerging Catholic Church decided to emphasise or ignore.The emergence of new positive theologies of silence: negative theology and its sources in the Platonic tradition; the development of asceticism in the mainstream Church in Syria from the second century, and its possible sources: the place of silence in the development of monasticism and eremetical life in Christianity.The importance of the remaking of monasticism in Egypt; the vital role of a forgotten theologian, Evagrius Ponticus.Recorded 24 April 2012 at St Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh. Audio version.

Diarmaid MacCulloch - Catholic Christianity and the arrival of ascetism, 100-400

Silence in Christian History: the witness of Holmes' DogLecture 1: Introduction. Voices and silence in Tanakh and Christian New Testament. Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch presents his introductory lecture in our 2012 Gifford lecture series. He discusses a change in emphasis between the Hebrew Scripture (the Tanakh) and what Christians made of what is arguably a minority positive strand in Judaic thinking on silence; we survey the growth of a consciousness of silence, particularly in the cosmos, in Jewish religion.We seek the voice of Jesus to be heard behind the text of the New Testament, with his distinctive use of silence and silences; the place of silence in the first Christian attempts to understand the significance of Jesus Christ, and its relationship to the formation of the Church. Recorded Monday 23 April 2012 at St Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh. Audio version.

Diarmaid MacCulloch - Voices and silence in Tanakh and Christian New Testament

Patricia Churchland

Prof Patricia Churchland's Gifford Lecture - Recorded 11 May, 2010 at St Cecelia's Hall, The University of Edinburgh. Self-caring neural circuitry embodies self-preservation values, and these are values in the most elemental sense. Whence caring for others? Social problem-solving, including policy-making, is probably an instance of problem-solving more generally, and draws upon the capacity, prodigious in humans, to envision consequences of a planned action. In humans, it also draws upon the capacity for improving upon current practices and technologies. Audio version.

Patricia Churchland - Morality and the Mammalian Brain

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