The Gifford Lectures ...

Gad, this is embarrassing. Brandon Watson at Siris posts a list of the Gifford Lectures. The Gifford Lectures is"an endowed lectureship at four Scottish universities on metaphysics, natural religion, and the foundations of ethics, and arguably the most prestigious academic lectureship in the English-speaking world." Not all of them have been, but the lectures are given with the intention that they will be published. Brandon emboldens the titles that he has read. I will not humiliate myself with a similar effort. I'm impressed with the claim of anyone to have had the stomach to get all the way through A. J. Pringle-Patterson's The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy.

There is some excuse for historians being less familiar with the Gifford Lectures than, say, philosophers and religionists, but a number of the lectures are of interest to historians, including those by Rudolph Bultmann, Herbert Butterfield, Owen Chadwick, Christopher Dawson, W. W. Fowler, H. M. Gwatkin, W. M. Ramsay, R. W. Southern, and Arnold Toynbee. At least two of the titles are essential documents in American intellectual history: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience and Reinhold Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man. The Gifford Lectures have not been uniformly excellent. Candidly, Watson includes John Dewey's The Quest for Certainty and Arnold Toynbee's An Historian's Approach to Religion as among the worst. His judgment about Dewey's book doesn't surprise me. John Dewey may have been the worst prose stylist ever to be considered a major intellectual figure. But Watson says that the physicist Nils Bohr was the all-time worst Gifford Lecturer. His"lectures were apparently so bad he went from a lecture hall of hundreds to less than ten stubborn advanced physics students; and they all remembered the lectures as monotonous to the point of horror."

Personally, I've been out of touch with the Gifford Lectures in more recent years and I'm happy to learn that my distinguished former colleague, Eleonore Stump, has been among the recent Gifford Lecturers. She is now a colleague of Wendy Love Anderson's at St. Louis University. Until I get my invitation from the Gifford people, I'll just have to bask in Eleonore's reflected glory. But I've been at work on my magnum opus. Ready when you are, Mr. Gifford ...