Gifford Lectures (audio)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.