Gifford Lectures 2022: Bicentenary Series

This is the recording of the first of the 2022 Bicentenary Series of Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Aberdeen. Speaking on the 4th of October, 2022, is Professor John Witte, Jr., delivering his lecture entitled 'A New Calvinist Reformation of Rights'. John Witte, Jr., JD (Harvard); Dr. Theol. h.c. (Heidelberg), is Woodruff University Professor, McDonald Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Law and Religion Center at Emory University.

A leading scholar of legal history, human rights, family law, and law and religion, he has published 275 articles and 33 books, most recently Church, State, and Family: Reconciling Traditional Teachings and Modern Liberties (Cambridge 2019). His writings have appeared in fifteen languages, and he has delivered more than 350 public lectures worldwide. He has directed 15 major international projects on democracy, human rights, and religious liberty; marriage, family, and children; and law and Christianity.

This is the recording of the second of the 2022 Bicentenary Series of Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Aberdeen. Speaking on the 18th of October, 2022, is Professor Robert McCauley, delivering his lecture entitled 'Religions and Their Cognitive Kin'.

Robert N. McCauley is William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus and the founding Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture at Emory University. A philosopher of cognitive science and a theoretical cognitive scientist of religion, he is the co-author with George Graham of Hearing Voices and Others Matters of the Mind: What Mental Abnormalities Can Teach Us about Religions (Oxford, 2020). He is also the author or co-author of four other books, including Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not (Oxford, 2011), and more than a hundred papers in philosophy, religion, and the cognitive sciences.

This is the recording of the third of the 2022 Bicentenary Series of Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Aberdeen. Speaking on the 8th of November, 2022, is Professor Lisa Sideris, delivering her lecture entitled 'Unnatural Theology in the Anthropocene'.

Lisa H Sideris is Professor of Environmental Studies, with affiliation in Religious Studies, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the ethical significance of natural processes and “environmental” values as they are captured or obscured by narratives and perspectives from religion and the sciences.

She is author of Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (University of California Press, 2017). She has written extensively on environmental pioneer Rachel Carson, and co-edited an interdisciplinary collection of essays titled Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge (SUNY 2008).

This is the recording of the fourth of the 2022 Bicentenary Series of Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Aberdeen. Speaking on the 15th of November, 2022, is Professor Tim Whitmarsh, delivering his lecture entitled 'Religion and Ancient Mediterranean Thought.'

Tim Whitmarsh FBA is the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of over 100 articles and 9 books, including Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (2015) and Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel (2018). He is general editor of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (5th edition). He has often contributed to newspapers such as The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, as well as to BBC radio and TV. He is currently editing a collected volume of translations of the Greek epic poets of the Roman Empire.

This is the recording of the fifth and final lecture in the 2022 Bicentenary Series of Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Aberdeen. Speaking on the 29th of November, 2022, is Professor John Dupré, delivering his lecture entitled 'A Brief History of Form'.

John Dupré is Professor of the Philosophy of Science, University of Exeter and Consulting Director of Egenis, The Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, which he founded in 2002. He previously worked at Oxford, Stanford, and Birkbeck College, London. His recent work has advocated a radically processual understanding of living systems, summarised in his most recent book, The Metaphysics of Biology (2021).

He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Honorary International Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the President of the Philosophy of Science Association.