The prestigious Gifford Lectureships were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820–1887), a senator of the College of Justice in Scotland. The purpose of Lord Gifford’s bequest to the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and Aberdeen was to sponsor lectures to “promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God”.
This website carries full information about the lecture series given at the University of St Andrews.
Gifford Lectures 2026
The Symptom’s Secret: An Apocalyptic Theology of Mental Health. Presented by Professor John Swinton, University of Aberdeen.
What if mental health symptoms are not simply signs of personal disorder, but indicators that something larger is disordered in the world around us? Symptoms such as hearing voices, compulsions, delusions, and memory loss refuse to stay neatly inside individual bodies. They rupture our settled ideas about the world and point us towards unnoticed aspects of creation that challenge our ideas about normality, knowledge, personhood, time, and even God. This lecture series focuses not on diagnoses but on symptoms, those epistemologically rebellious units of human experience that transcend the clinical and lead us into new understandings of the world. The strange new world that they attune us to is the place where Jesus is unveiling the new creation, if we have eyes to see. A focus on mental health symptoms will help us see that the natural world we assume to be the norm, must itself be viewed differently: apocalyptically.
The series brings mental health symptoms into conversation with apocalyptic theology, a tradition largely absent from discussions of mental distress. Apocalypse is understood here not as end-times catastrophe but as God’s act of unveiling: a Divine invasion of love designed to rescue us from the Lordless Powers that, although defeated on the cross, continue to wreak havoc on the world. The aim of this series is not to replace clinical frameworks but to supplement them with a theological account of the world’s disorder and God’s liberating apocalypse. Throughout, the series will develop an approach to mental health care that not only offers compassionate care to suffering individuals but learns to read these experiences in ways that attune us to the work of the Powers and Principalities and to the cruciform, apocalyptic movement of God in, to, and for the world.
Lecture Programme
Tuesday 24 March
An Invasion of Love: Mental Health Symptoms and Apocalyptic Attunement
Thursday 26 March
The Epistemic Chaos of the Powers: Delusions, Narrative Resistance, and the Apocalyptic Practice of Hospitality
Tuesday 31 March
Megan’s Loops: Why We Are Not All “A Little OCD” and Why That Matters
Thursday 2 April
Where Is the Demon? Hearing Voices, Possession, and the Mislocation of Evil
Tuesday 7 April
The End of Narrative: Why Stories are Not Central To Who We Are
Thursday 9 April
After Nature, Within Care: Natural Theology And Mental Health Symptoms After Apocalypse
All talks will take place in the Bute Building BUT: C4, Lecture Theatre D, 17.00 – 18.30
