Christopher van Ginhoven Rey teaches courses on late medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Spain and Latin America, literary and cultural analysis, and various Spanish language courses. Recently he completed a book-length study of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. The book, titled Instruments of the Divinity: Providence and Praxis in the Foundation of the Society of Jesus, focuses on one metaphor, that of Jesuits as instruments of a laboring God. It explores the place of this metaphor in the social imaginary of the Jesuit order, as well as its relation to important shifts in the conceptualization of the realm of praxis in the modern age.

Before coming to Trinity, he taught medieval and Renaissance studies at New York University and Spanish language and literature courses at Dartmouth College. He has written essays and given talks on Spanish mysticism and its relation to aesthetics and hermeneutics, aspects of Jesuit and Catholic culture, Saint Augustine, Góngora's Soledades, and several philosophers he admires, such as Heidegger, Gadamer, and Blumenberg.

He also has a strong interest in contemporary Latin American literature, and has translated works by Mario Bellatin, Fabio Morabito, Alan Pauls, and José Agustín. In 2005, his novel La evasión was published by Editorial Matalamanga in Lima.