Legacy of Historic Gifford Lectures Presented Online

by Heidi Schlumpf, Religion Bookline -- Publishers Weekly, 8/24/2005

Back in 1885, when Scottish jurist Adam Lord Gifford bequeathed 80,000 pounds in his will to establish a series of lectures on natural theology, he would never have imagined that more than 100 years later all those lectures would be available to scholars and the general public all over the world with the click of a small device called a mouse.

They soon will be. Templeton Foundation Press launched the online database, < a href=http://www.giffordlectures.org target="new">www.giffordlectures.org, August 15, during the Edinburgh Book Festival. The new site contains 48 of the 208 volumes that resulted from the 212 lectures (the most famous being William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience) as well as a third of the summaries of those books, and half of the lecturers’ biographies. The remaining 160 books will be added to the site in the next few years.

Although Templeton publishes books about natural theology—understanding God through reason, as opposed to revelation—they have not published any of the Gifford lecture books. Still, executive director and publisher Joanna Hill saw this as a natural fit for the press. “With new technology it seemed if we could make this material available to scholars and researchers it would be a tremendous contribution to the field of science and religion,” she said.

The press received a grant for $1.3 million over a period of three years from the separate Templeton Foundation to fund the project. Phase one involved posting all materials currently in the public domain. For phase two, at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, Hill hopes to negotiate with publishers of Gifford books currently out of print but still under copyright. The final phase, dealing with books still in print, is scheduled to be completed by 2007.

Although the material is available free on the Web site, protecting intellectual property rights is a priority. Hill said the site might offer only glimpses of in-print books or limit cut-and-paste functions. “We will negotiate with the individual publishers, but I think if we put these safeguards in place, everyone will be comfortable,” she said.