About
Dr. Jens Zimmermann is J. I. Packer Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, BC. He was born and raised in Germany. He studied at the University of British Columbia, earning his first Ph.D in Comparative Literature in 1997. He taught at UBC briefly before moving on to Trinity Western, where held the Canada Research Chair of Interpretation, Religion and Culture from 2006 to 2016. In 2010, he earned a second Ph.D in Philosophy from the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. He was awarded a research fellowship at Cambridge University (Trinity Hall) for 2016–17, and a British Academy Visiting Fellowship in theology at the University of Oxford (Christ Church College) for 2018–2019. He is currently visiting fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought and also a research fellow at the University of the Free State, South Africa (2021–2023).
His main intellectual interests are anthropology and epistemology. He has pursued these two central questions across a broad range of interests that include theological anthropology, hermeneutics, European literature, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, the church fathers, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Eastern Orthodox theology. His published works include the monographs Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christian Humanism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Humanism and Religion: A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture (Oxford University Press, 2012). He has edited numerous volumes, including the recently published Human Flourishing in a Technological World: A Theological Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2023), Reimagining The Sacred: Debating God with Richard Kearney, co-edited with Richard Kearney (Columbia University Press, 2016), among others.
Houston Centre for Humanity and the Common Good
Dr. Zimmermann directs the Houston Centre for Humanity and the Common Good, grounded in Dr. James M. Houston’s comprehensive vision of integrative scholarship. The Houston Centre fosters interdisciplinary and interreligious dialogue on the central question of the late-modern world: what does it mean to be human?
Inviting a range of philosophical perspectives through collaboration with the University of British Columbia and other institutions, the Centre explores a holistic understanding of humanity that accounts for the unique social, political, and theological issues of our time.
Human Flourishing in a Technological World
Dr. Zimmermann is the editor of the recently published volume, Human Flourishing in a Technological World: A Theological Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2023). These essays address the question of human identity and flourishing in the light of recent technological advances. How did we move from a religious and mostly embodied anthropology of the person to the idea that we can upload human consciousness to computing platforms? How did we come to imagine that machines can actually be intelligent, or even learn in human fashion? And how are such beliefs impinging on how we treat our fellow human beings?
The volume features 13 contributions from leading scholars in philosophy, psychiatry, theology, and other disciplines: Thomas Fuchs, Fr John Behr, Celia Deane-Drummond, and others. The book also includes the text of a lecture by virtual reality engineer and computer scientist Jaron Lanier, and a discussion between Lanier and the volume’s other contributors.
