• It’s been 137 years since Friedrich Nietzsche has published his book The Gay Science or The Joyful Wisdom wherein he first declared that “God is Dead”, an idea which he repeated a few years later in his philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra. How could Nietzsche declare the death of someone in whose existence he never believed? What he meant was the even the idea of God has died. Thus for several believers, God became a problem rather than the ultimate meaning.

    DISCERN’s Benjamin Tonna Lecture 2019 will deal with such issues in a lecture delivered by Professor Denys Turner. This year’s theme will be “Nietzsche and How Finally to Get Rid of God” and in an increasingly secularised society, this theme has come to the fore. The event will be held on Tuesday, 15th January 2019, at The Old Refectory of the Archbishop’s Curia in Floriana, at 7 p.m. The general public is invited to attend.

    Prof. Denys Turner is a British academic in the fields of philosophy and theology. He has held distinguished professorial appointments at the best universities in the world such as Bristol University, Birmingham University, Cambridge University and Yale University.

    He has taught on a wide range of subjects, including contemporary philosophy of religion, metaphysics, ethics, political and social theory, medieval philosophy and theology, and the history of medieval mysticism. In his early career, his main area of research was the relations between Christianity and political and social theory, particularly between Marxism and Christianity. More recently, his area of concentration is the study of the traditions of Western Christian mysticism, with special emphasis on doctrines of religious language and of selfhood and on the links between the classical traditions of spirituality and mysticism and the social and political commitments of Christianity.

    Professor Turner’s is the author of Marxism and Christianity, Faith Seeking, The Darkness of God, Eros and Allegory, Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait, and most recently Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God.