Professor Kathryn Tanner - Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism

Professor Kathryn Tanner is Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology, at Yale Divinity School. 

Event Details

Dates: 2, 3, 5, 9, 10 and 12 May 2016

Time: 5.30pm to 6.30pm

The lecture may be followed by questions. Latest finishing time is 7pm.

Venue: Multiple venues. Please see the series summary below.

Series summary

The current configuration of capitalism, in which finance plays a dominant role, has the capacity to shape people in ways that hinder the development of any critical perspective on it.  This series of lectures will explore the various cultural forms of finance-dominated capitalism and suggest how their pervasive force in human life might be countered by Christian beliefs and practices with a comparable person-shaping capacity. In this way, these lectures reverse the project of the German sociologist Max Weber in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, while employing much the same methods as he used.  Weber showed how Christian beliefs and practices could form persons in line with what capitalism required of them.  These lectures will demonstrate the capacity of Christian beliefs and practices to help people resist the dictates of capitalism in its present, finance-dominated configuration.

Gifford Lectures Blog

Take part in the discussion

The Gifford Lectureship Committee welcomes further discussion around the themes of Professor Tanner's Series on our blog.

David Robinson, PhD candidate in Theology and Ethics at New College, University of Edinburgh, will host this year's blog.  He will share his reflections on themes arising from the series and invite your contributions.

The blog will be active from 2 to 20 May 2016.

Comment on Professor Tanner’s series on our blog

Gifford Seminar

Professor Kathryn Tanner will join academics from the University of Edinburgh to discuss questions from the audience arising from her Gifford Lecture Series, "Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism".

Series videos

The lecture will be recorded and links will be posted in the respective pages of each lecture.

Biography

Kathryn Tanner joined the Yale Divinity School faculty in 2010 after teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School for sixteen years and in Yale’s Department of Religious Studies for ten. Her research relates the history of Christian thought to contemporary issues of theological concern using social, cultural, and feminist theory.

She is the author of God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Blackwell, 1988); The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (Fortress, 1992); Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Fortress, 1997); Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Fortress, 2001); Economy of Grace (Fortress, 2005); Christ the Key (Cambridge, 2010); and scores of scholarly articles and chapters in books that include The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, which she edited with John Webster and Iain Torrance.

Professor Tanner serves on the editorial boards of Modern Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology, and Scottish Journal of Theology, and is a former coeditor of the Journal of Religion.

Active in many professional societies, Professor Tanner is a past president of the American Theological Society, the oldest theological society in the United States. For eight years she has been a member of the Theology Committee that advises the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops. In the academic year 2010-2011, she had a Luce Fellowship to research financial markets and the critical perspectives that Christian theology can bring to bear on them.

Related Links

Professor Tanner's academic profile

An article about Professor Tanner, from the Yale Divinity School's alumni magazine