Michael VanZandt Collins
Harvard University
Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations
Boston College
Comparative Theology, Muslim and Christian
Theological Ethics
Personal bio
Scholarly bio
Michael VanZandt Collins, PhD, is a Boston-based writer, teacher, scholar and environmentalist. His research interests include the modern retrieval of virtue ethics, the burgeoning discipline of climate ethics, and prospects for Muslim-Christian comparative theological learning.
Starting out as an ethicist, VanZandt Collins earned a degree in social ethics at Boston College. In 2013, he earned a Master’s degree from Harvard University’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department. At Boston College, where he previously received a Master’s degree with a focus in Social Ethics, he defended his doctoral dissertation, “Climate Change, Virtue, and Moral Agency: An Essay in Muslim-Christian Comparative Theological Ethics.”
He not only studies dialogue, but also participates and attempts to faciliate dialogue. When studying Arabic in Amman, Jordan, from 2012 to 2013, he volunteered as a translator at the Jordanian Interfaith Coexistence Research Center, with Father Nabil Haddad.
In 2023, he accepted an invitation to an international working group of Muslim and Christian scholars, organized jointly by the Qatar Foundation and Georgetown University, under the banner of the “The Environmental Challenge: Muslim and Christian Perspectives.”
VanZandt Collins is a current members of the American Academy of Religion and the Catholic Theological Society of America, and a former member of the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics. He has been a researcher, contractor, and consultant for numerous nonprofits, including The Trustees of Reservation (the nation’s oldest and Massachusetts’s largest conservation organization), Harvard’s Sackler Museum, Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium, and the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies. He provides support services to the Laudato si’ Action Platform.
Lately, his efforts are dedicated towards the possibility of community-based stewardship of food forests as a means for building resilience, including bonds of solidarity and social cohesion, in an era of climate change.
Michael has always loved encountering new people and listening to their stories. First at the encouragement of his mother and now in the company of his wife, he has also harbored the love of travel, visiting most of the states in the USA, Mexico, Quebec, China, Ireland, Turkey, Spain, Morocco, Germany, Denmark, England, France, and Australia. Wherever he has visited, the power of these encounters and the possibilities of dialogue have shaped his life.
Before he became an academic and a researcher, he worked as a field organizer in Ohio, a community organizer to bring green building services and opportunities to nonprofits in Roxbury, and a host of other jobs including a welder apprentice with a mechanical contractor, carpentry with a construction outfit, an assistant stage manager at a theatre company in the Berkshires, and a teacher at an urban Catholic high school.
When not working, he is always to get out hiking. At home, he has nurtured in recent years a passion for gardening, especially preferring edible native plants. A native of Western Massachusetts, he remembers hiking portions of the Appalachian Trail in the Berkshires with his grandfather, Bernard (“Doc”). He is presently, as a candidate of the secular Franciscans, in formation and discerning profession.
He lives in Boston with his wife, Lipika, and his son, Rory, yearning for the day when they adopt a rescue dog.