While John Alexander Smith never published his Gifford Lectures, W.J. Mander has suggested that "a sense of his position may be gained from his contribution to the second series of Muirhead's Contemporary British Philosophy, where he characterizes his idealism in three theses; that reality is something essentially in process or historical (unlike the stationary or immobile Absolute of Bradley or Bosanquet), that history is something essentially spiritual, and that spirit is something which most freely and fully manifests itself in self-consciousness." W.J.

An Historian’s Approach to Religion is divided into two parts. The first charts the evolution of religion. From the earliest manifestation in nature worship, Toynbee notes a shift to worshipping local communities represented by the deification of the city-state (like Athens or Sparta). Eventually this local identity succumbed to worship of ecumenical communities, generally incarnated in a ruler (as the emperors of Rome were deified) before the worship of external deities. The benefit of external deities was that they offered external and transcendent authority.

From the publisher's website:

This book collects the first section of Gifford Lectures delivered by the distinguished neuroscientist, Sir John C. Eccles, at the University of Edinburgh 1977–78. This opening series was later followed by a collection entitled The Human Psyche, which builds upon the final three lectures given here. Beginning with a reference to Sherrington’s noted lectures given forty years earlier, Eccles argues that, given the advances made in terms of knowledge, problems have to be revisited.

Dixon’s two courses of Glasgow Gifford Lectures, delivered from 1935–1937, were printed immediately following their conclusion in 1937. In his magnum opus, The Human Situation, Dixon discusses the nature of the human soul with respect to humanity’s historical, cultural and philosophical situation. He argues that human experience—wisdom and folly, dreams and desires, creations and destructions—are integral to the process of cosmic becoming.

G. A. Cohen begins this publication of the Gifford Lectures of 1996 by asking the audience to consider the effect of upbringing on the final position any individual takes in life and how his personal experiences from being raised in a fervently Marxist and anti-religious home have led him to a surprising shift from Marxism out the other side of radical liberalism to a strong belief in the necessity of social and moral element to socialism more akin to the Judeo-Christian treatment of the issue of equality.

In his 1983-4 Gifford Lectures, ‘In Search of Deity,’ John Macquarrie undertakes the breathtakingly ambitious project of outlining a coherent natural theology which addresses the pressing needs of ethics, theology, religious experience, and ecclesiastical life. The lectures begin with some crucial prolegomenal ground-clearing, as Macquarrie seeks to vindicate natural theology against Humean and Kantian objections, contending that such modern critiques are based upon a faulty view of God as unqualifiedly transcendent and disjointed from the world.

Albert Schweitzer, Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology, ed. Charles R. Joy. Boston: Beacon, 1947 contains the following note on Schweitzer's first course of lectures:

In this volume, John Hick provides the most mature exposition of his understanding of religion and how different religions relate to each other. The most prominent defender of religious pluralism offers here different approaches to the own religion and how religions can be understood with different criteria.