Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Chained to the Past". The second lecture in the series considers the way in which persons, as both workers and debtors, are encouraged to relate to past decisions that constrain present action within finance-dominated capitalism. The presumed inevitability of this way of relating to the past is undercut by appealing to Christian forms of self-repudiation in conversion and to the ruptured narratives that go along with them. Recorded 3 May 2016 at the University of Edinburgh's George Square Lecture Theatre.

Prof. Kathryn Tanner - Total Commitment

For over a century, the Gifford Lectures have enabled international scholars to contribute to the advancement of theological and philosophical thought. The Gifford Lectureships, which are held at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and St. Andrews, were established under the will of Adam Lord Gifford, a Senator of the College of Justice, who died in 1887. The 2012 Edinburgh Gifford lectures is a series of six lectures delivered by Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, The University of Oxford.