The 2020 Didsbury Lectures are provided by Nazarene Theological College, Manchester, and this year will be delivered through videoconference and live streamed through the NTC Facebook page.
These are free lectures and open to the public, and will take place over four sessions, from 26th to 29th October.
The lectures will be presented by Professor John Swinton and here is his introduction:
Title: Moving beyond the empire of illusion: what do we do about the problem of evil?
Evil hides in strange places. In these lectures I will build upon and respond to some of the criticisms and concerns of my previous work on evil in the book Raging With Compassion. Responding to Jesus’s words: “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil,” The question throughout will be what does evil do. We will learn that evil comes in the banality of everyday experiences, and in radical evils such as genocide, persecution, oppression, and abuse. We will also learn how easy it is for all of us to become caught up in radical evil. Small evils feed into bigger evils. Taken together the four lectures will offer a practical theology of resistance to evil that focuses on what evil does and what we need to do to resist it.