Prof. David Novak delivered the 2017 Gifford Lectures this spring. His lecture series, titled Athens and Jerusalem: God, Humans, and Nature, explored the dynamic interrelation of reason and revelation in the history of Jewish and Christian theology and Western philosophy from antiquity. Specifically, these lectures contended that both Hebraic theology and Hellenic philosophy arise from revelations. These revelations constitute comprehensive ways of life, and theologians and philosophers have reasoned upon and about them respectively.
Since their inception in 1888, the Gifford Lectures have become the foremost intellectual event dealing with religion, science and philosophy. Lectures are given in the ancient Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews. Some past lecturers include Henri Bergson, Hannah Arendt, Iris Murdoch, Carl Sagan, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Ignatieff, Noam Chomsky, Terry Eagleton, and Bruno Latour.