John Kilner

Kilner then assembled the team of Gilbert Meilaender from Valparaiso University (and member of the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics), Amy Laura Hall from Duke University, Scott Rae from Biola University, David Gushee from Mercer University, Russell DiSilvestro from California State University, and Patrick Smith from Duke University. The team’s purpose was to compare a biblical account of why people matter with contemporary secular accounts. The result was Kilner’s edited book, Why People Matter, released by Baker Academic in 2017.

In 1996 he was promoted at Trinity to full Professor, and in 1999 was awarded its Franklin and Dorothy Forman endowed chair in ethics and theology. In 2005 he became its Director of Bioethics Programs, providing academic direction for Masters-level degree initiatives in North America, Asia, and Africa. Upon retirement from Trinity, he was named Professor Emeritus of Bioethics and Contemporary Culture there. Trinity marked Kilner's retirement by launching the annual John Kilner Lectureship in Bioethics and the Kilner Student Mentorship Fund at the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity.

In 1988, he conducted a questionnaire study involving medical directors of kidney dialysis and kidney transplantation facilities in the United States. Directors identified the weight that each of 16 different patient selection criteria receive in selecting patients for treatment (e.g., medical benefit, social value, age). They also indicated how that weight would increase or decrease were medical resources to become somewhat more limited in supply. That study was originally published in the American Journal of Public Health, with further analysis in the book Who Lives? Who Dies?

From 1983 to 1990 he was professor of social ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary in the Lexington, Kentucky area, and taught medical ethics at the University of Kentucky. Following three years as Senior Associate at the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics in Chicago, in 1993 he became founding director of the Bannockburn Institute for Christianity and Contemporary Culture and its Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, in Bannockburn, Illinois. He also received a teaching post at nearby Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Kilner's first project was interviews with government and missionary health care workers as well as with traditional healers among the Akamba people in Kenya, to gain cross-cultural insight into how decisions are made regarding who receives access to limited health care resources. The study investigated the effect of exposure to Western values (through the educational system) on what people consider to be ethical approaches to resource allocation. It was published in the Hastings Center Report in 1972, with further analysis in the 1990 Yale University Press book Who Lives? Who Dies? and the 1992 Eerdmans book Life on the Line.

John F. Kilner (born August 12, 1952) is a bioethicist who held the Franklin and Dorothy Forman endowed chair in ethics and theology at Trinity International University, where he was also Professor of Bioethics and Contemporary Culture and Director of Bioethics Degree Programs. He is a Senior Fellow at The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity (CBHD) in Deerfield, Illinois, where he served as Founding Director until Fall 2005.