released 6/4/2025

In this third lecture from an October 2017 series of lectures titled “Religion without Morality,” Oliver O’Donovan explores how the “religion” of modernity lacks a coherent world in which one may participate with full human agency and moral purpose. Moral action is either meaningless or wholly fragmented, since the prevailing assumption is that “fact” must be hostile to all moral reasoning. So, like the religion of pagan Rome and that of European Calvinism in the 17th century (case studies which O’Donovan covered in the first two lectures in the series), there is no unifying or intelligible moral vision that upholds meaningful human action in a real created cosmos. True religion, he asserts, must start with the Supreme God — God — and must aim at virtue, connecting it coherently with virtuous action in a world that bears the marks of that action in its historical record. And it must recover the fullness of wisdom, embodied in Jesus, the Son of God and ultimate moral Teacher. The title of this lecture is “Ourselves and the Religion of Modernity.”

This lecture is provided courtesy of the Hayward Lecture Series at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, Canada. Listen to the first lecture in the series here, and the second here.

61 minutes

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