Events

Being human in our technological age requires not merely technical skills but—more importantly—intellectual capacity to navigate a rapidly changing philosophical milieu. Join us this winter for our online lecture series, Human Flourishing in a Technological Age, to learn from leading scholars about key aspects of what it means to be human in a technological age: personhood, embodied cognition, leisure, transhumanism and more.

Please join us on Friday,  February 12 as Regent's Dr. Jens Zimmermann will give the lecture "Who am I? Personhood, Technology, and Human Flourishing."

In this lecture, Dr. Zimmermann will address modern understandings of human consciousness, including Trans- and Post- humanist visions for the future of human society, and will argue that contemporary notions of the human person presume a reductive model of human identity rooted in an already defunct scientific epistemology. As a counterpoint to this construction, Dr. Zimmermann will offer a robust model of human consciousness that is grounded in the philosophically and theologically informed theory of personalism—a personalism that, in the Christian tradition, is validated in and through the Incarnation.

Dr. Jens Zimmermann is J.I. Packer Chair of Theology at Regent College/UBC and Research Associate at the Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought (CTMET) in Oxford. As a philosophical theologian, Dr. Zimmermann’s main intellectual interests are philosophical anthropology (who we are) and epistemology (how we know). He has pursued these two central questions across a broad range of interests that include theological anthropology, patristic and modern theology, hermeneutics (theological and philosophical), European literature, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. In addition to many scholarly articles, Zimmermann has authored and edited numerous books, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christian Humanism (Oxford UP, 2019), and Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism: Education and the Restoration of Humanity (Oxford UP, 2017). Recent editing work includes Acts of Interpretation: Scripture, Theology, and Culture (co-edited with S. A. Cummins, Eerdmans, 2018), and Sources of the Christian Self: A Cultural History of Christian Identity (co-edited with James Houston, Eerdmans, 2018). Zimmermann’s current major research project examines the impact of technology on human identity with particular focus on the concept of personhood.Check back to this space in early 2021 for registration information.