Professor David Livingstone will deliver the 2014 Gifford Lectures in February at the University of Aberdeen on the subject of Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution.
In this series, Livingstone examines the role of place, politics and rhetoric in the way religious communities sharing a Scots Presbyterian heritage engaged with Darwinism in different venues - Edinburgh, Belfast, Columbia and Princeton. What emerges is the degree to which debates over Darwin were deeply embedded in local circumstances whether to do with anxieties over the control of higher education, views about the politics of race relations, challenges to traditional cultural identity, or attitudes to higher criticism. Attending to such particularities is intended to subvert the perennial inclination of many to speak of the relationship between science and religion - not least in our own day.
Please see the Gifford Lectures website here for more information.
David Livingstone is Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at the Queen's University of Belfast. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and the recipient of an Honorary DLitt from the University of Aberdeen. Alongside his work on the historical geography of science and religion he currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to write a new book on "The Empire of Climate."