Professor Stout delivered the sixth and final of his Gifford Lectures last night. My summary  is below. The video of Stout’s lecture is embedded below for those who were unable to attend in person, or for those who’d like to listen to it again. An audio only version can be  found at the end of this post. In order to further facilitate discussion George Walters-Sleyon will provide his initial reflections on Professor Stout’s final lecture. George is PhD candidate in Practical Theology and Christian Ethics at New College, University of Edinburgh. We’d like to reiterate that we warmly welcome anyone wishing to engage with Stout’s lectures to contribute their comments and questions below.

Professor Stout began the first section of his final lecture speaking about “ethical religion and coalitional politics.” He referred to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Why We Can’t Wait (1963) and to his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which he wrote in solitary confinement also in 1963. His letter was written in response to eight “moderate” clergymen who had publicly expressed their disapproval of the civil rights protests going on.  Stout then quoted King’s question to these clergymen that has been at the center of his own lectures: “Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?” In many ways, these lectures have been an endeavor to more fully understand what King wrote here in this letter. Stout went on to note Emerson’s influence on King and King’s appropriation of aspects from “the traditions of black preaching, natural law, and personalist theology, each of which distinguishes ethical from unethical religion in its own terms.”

Stout went on to note that “King treats the separation of religion from politics as a heresy that moderate clergy use to excuse inaction in the face of oppression” and that both King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel believed the bifurcation of the sacred and the secular to be a cause of racism. Stout went on to mention that “King and Heschel used the term religion to form a political coalition of Christians and Jews” and in doing so they challenged the relegation of religion to the private realm. Stout ended the first section of his lecture by noting that Gandhi, too, was a “a multilingual coalition builder.”

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Last night following Professor Stout’s final lecture Professor Larry Hurtado delivered a brief vote of thanks. Hurtado is Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature & Theology at the University of Edinburgh. His vote of thanks is posted below.

In these six Gifford lectures, Professor Stout has challenged cogently the grand narrative of a “great separation” in Western cultural history in which religion was relocated from a previously public influence to a more private and hobbyist sphere, which supposedly enabled Western culture to move in liberationist directions including the emergence of modern democracy, free inquiry, and more egalitarian values.  Professor Stout’s effective challenge to this narrative has been conducted by an in-depth historical analysis of key figures who serve as case-studies of genuinely religious individuals across several centuries who each criticized then-dominant political values and practices precisely on the basis of their religious convictions.  To borrow a phrase, these lectures comprise their own “inconvenient truth” over against the romanticized narrative of secularization that has been so popularly and uncritically echoed.  I am not able to summarize the wealth of these lectures, and it would be tedious for me to attempt to do so.  Nothing could, or should, substitute for hearing them, or hearing them again (on the Gifford Lectures web site), and in due course, we hope, reading them in published form.  But I am honoured to be asked to offer a brief vote of thanks.

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Professor Stout delivered the fifth of his Gifford Lectures last night. My summary  is below. The video of Stout’s lecture is embedded below for those who were unable to attend in person, or for those who’d like to listen to it again. An audio only version can be  found at the end of this post. In order to further facilitate discussion Professor David Fergusson will be adding his initial reflections on Professor Stout’s fifth lecture. Fergusson is Professor of Divinity and Principal of New College at the University of Edinburgh and he himself is also a former Gifford Lecturer. S. Kyle Johnson will also provide his initial reflections on some of the themes that have arisen in the lectures so far. Kyle is currently pursuing a PhD in Systematic Theology at Boston College. We’d like to reiterate that we warmly welcome anyone wishing to engage with Stout’s lectures to contribute their comments and questions below.

Professor Stout begins his fifth lecture by speaking of Nietzche’s eclipse of Emerson. Emerson spoke of many of the same themes that Nietzsche did before Nietzsche did, but Nietzsche’s version is the one most remembered today. As Stout mentioned, “Bookstores have moved Emerson to the self-help aisle. We read his sayings on greeting cards and wince. Nietzsche is in every theologian’s shoulder bag. Self-reliance is now served black, no sugar, in a Parisian demitasse.” According to Stout, most academics now only know Emersonian themes “by way of Nietzsche’s anti-democratic variations on them.” Emerson himself met with a mixed reception in his visits to Scotland, ranging from charges of “ill-disguised infidelity” to more charitable and sympathetic yet critical appreciation of him by people like James Stirling (the first Gifford Lecturer) and Lord Gifford himself. Many on both sides of the Atlantic saw something of value in Emerson. Stout ended the first section of his lecture by saying, “If we want to understand the modern ideal of ethical religion” then “we had better figure out what these and many other activists, including King, saw in Emerson.”

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Professor Stout talks briefly about his work and his experience giving the Edinburgh Gifford Lectures.

Professor Stout delivered the fourth of his Gifford Lectures last night. My summary  is below. The video of Stout’s lecture is embedded below for those who were unable to attend in person, or for those who’d like to listen to it again. An audio only version can be  found at the end of this post. In order to further facilitate discussion my colleague Ryan Tafilowski will be adding his initial reflections on Professor Stout’s fourth lecture. Ryan is currently a PhD student in Systematic Theology at New College, University of Edinburgh. We’d like to reiterate that we warmly welcome anyone wishing to engage with Stout’s lectures to contribute their comments and questions below.

Professor Stout started his fourth lecture by discussing abolitionism. He distinguished two different “modes of emancipatory politics:” the antislavery movement and the secularist movement. According to Stout, the latter views religion as “essentially oppressive” while the former “distinguishes virtuous religion from its oppressive semblances.” Recognizing these two distinct modes is important as they correlate with different approaches to political engagement, both historically and today. As he said, “this basic conceptual difference correlates with differences in argument, explanation, objectives, means, and organization.”

Stout talked about Hume’s British contemporaries who, while they disagreed over the nature of rationality and other theological issues and even though they came from various religious backgrounds (Quaker, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Unitarian), they all agreed that true religion was incompatible with slavery. Stout then went on to make the claim that it was “their distinction between religion’s supernatural and mundane ends” that enabled them to cooperate with one another and that “the religiously plural nature of their coalition was essential to its political success.” Stout then gave a number of abolitionist examples to illustrate this distinct style of political engagement.

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Last night Professor Stout delivered the third of his Gifford Lectures. My summary (with an embedded question) is below. The video of Stout’s lecture is also embedded below for those who were unable to attend in person, or for those who’d like to listen to it again. An audio only version can also be found at the end of this post. In order to further facilitate discussion my colleague Nomi Pritz-Bennett will be adding her initial reflections on Professor Stout’s third lecture. Nomi is currently a PhD student in Systematic Theology at New College, University of Edinburgh. We’d like to reiterate that we warmly welcome anyone wishing to engage with Stout’s lectures to contribute their comments and questions below.

Professor Stout began his third lecture by restating his aim in this series. Namely, “to clarify an ideal of ethical religion, trace its political history, and explain its survival in a supposedly secular age.” He sets out to do this by taking a closer look at the notions of religion, freedom, and faith and how they have related to one another. In the first section he focused on how faith has been taken to relate to religion.

He admits that nowadays the terms have become virtually synonymous; illustrated by the fact that various religions are often referred to as various faiths. As he stated, “Native American, African, and Asian traditions that are sometimes classified as religious are also called faiths. This dubious habit has something to do with Christianity’s semantic status in many modern settings as the paradigmatic instance of religion.” This phenomenon makes sense, according to Stout, given Christianity’s prevalent role in Europe and in the global spread of religion-talk, for better or worse.

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Last night Professor Stout delivered the second of his Gifford Lectures. The video of Stout’s lecture is embedded below for those who were unable to attend in person, or for those who’d like to listen to it again. An audio only version can also be found at the end of this post. In order to further facilitate discussion my colleague Cameron Clausing will be adding his initial reflections on Professor Stout’s second  lecture. Cam is currently a postgraduate student at New College, University of Edinburgh. We’d like to reiterate that we warmly welcome anyone wishing to engage with Stout’s lectures to contribute their comments and questions below.

Professor Stout opens his second lecture by defining tyranny and oppression as they relate to the global spread of religion-talk (as it relates to the Latin term religio) and its ties to imperialism. A tyrant is someone who “exercises power over someone for reasons contrary to the common good.” Oppression occurs when tyrants “unjustly press a person or a group into servitude.” According to Stout, servitude is synonymous with being “subjected to domination” where this is understood as being “at the mercy of another’s will, as a slave is vulnerable to a master’s arbitrary power.” Just as superstition is false religion (and not merely a bad form of religion) a tyrant is a false king not merely a bad one. Like superstition and true religion tyrants (morally vicious) and kings (morally virtuous) are incompatible by definition.

Stout then moved on to talk at length about the early modern Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (referencing a few others along the way). He focused on Las Casas’ mediating role between the conquistadors and the Indian population amidst the many horrendous events that transpired, which were in part justified by the conquistadors through misunderstood appeals to religion as it was tied up with royal authority. The conquistadors were oppressive and they tyrannically forced the Indian population into servitude. This was incompatible with true religion, despite their delusions of being exemplars of it.

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