Prof. Cornel West delivers the 2024 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled ‘A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane’. This is the last of six lectures, titled ‘A Love Supreme (A Way Through)’.

In his final Gifford Lecture, Professor Cornel R. West’s jazz-soaked philosophy looks unflinchingly at our own catastrophic times, and says that ‘perhaps’ we can find a way out. How do we go on loving, living, fighting, laughing, crying, swinging and singing? One answer, he proposes, lies in his tradition: the rich tradition of Black love in freedom and Black freedom in love. In literature, the two giants of this tradition are W. E. B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison. And in music, the Black tradition was honed in nearly three centuries of slavery and nearly another century of neo-slavery. This tradition kept a weary people in a God-forsaken world flowing with styles and smiles. As Prof. West powerfully concludes his Gifford Lectures, he shows us how amid catastrophe, this Love Supreme transcends words, flows beneath sentences, and becomes flesh in deeds.

Prof. West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy & Christian Practice, Union Theological Seminary, New York. His teaching and publications focus on roles of race, gender, and class struggle in American society, synthesizing influences from Christianity, the Black Church, democratic socialism, left-wing populism, neopragmatism and transcendentalism. A musician and spoken word artist, Prof. West has collaborated with acts across the rap, hip-hop and funk genres, as well as appearing in the Matrix series and many documentary films.

The prestigious Gifford Lectureships, held at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St Andrews, have been delivered annually since 1888 by a succession of distinguished international scholars. The Lectureships were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820-1887) to ‘promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term – in other words, the knowledge of God’, and have enabled a most notable field of scholars to contribute to the advancement of theological thought.