C. Ben Mitchell

Photo by Zac Calvert
Dr. C. Ben Mitchell, graves professor of moral philosophy and the school of theology and missions, preaches on how so many in the world expect to live when Christians need to expect to die.

C. Ben Mitchell is Graves professor of moral philosophy at Union University in Tennessee and editor of Ethics & Medicine: An International Journal of Bioethics. He also serves as senior co-editor of Renewing Minds: A Journal of Faith, Learning, and Culture.

Prior to joining the Union faculty, he taught bioethics and contemporary culture for a decade at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where he was also director of the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity from 2006-2008. Before that he taught at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

He received his doctorate in philosophy with a concentration in medical ethics (with honors) from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he also taught undergraduates.  His program included a year-long clinical residency at the University of Tennessee Medical Center at Knoxville, Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, and a summer-long residency at the East Tennessee Mental Health Institute.

Mitchell has done additional study in genetics for non-scientists at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, Cold Spring Harbor, New York and has twice been visiting scholar at Green College, the medical college of Oxford University.

He has served as a consultant with the Center for Genetics & Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University; co-director for Biotechnology Policy and Fellow of the Council for Biotechnology Policy in Washington, D.C.; a fellow of the Institute for Biotechnology and a Human Future at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago-Kent School of Law; a fellow of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC.

He was a member of the Templeton Oxford Summer Symposium on Religion and Science (2003-2005).  He was also invited to participate in the Calvin Summer Seminar on Religion, Modernity, and the Hermeneutics of Science (2012).

In addition to his academic work, Mitchell also consults on matters of public policy and has given testimonies before policymaking groups including the U. S. House of Representatives, the Institutes of Medicine, and the Illinois Senate.  He has published in major news media, including the Washington Post and is interviewed regularly on radio and television, having appeared on National Public Radio, Fox News, MSNBC, and others.

He is the co-author of Biotechnology and the Human Good (Georgetown University Press, 2007), with Edmund Pellegrino, Jean Bethke Elshtain, John Kilner, and Scott Rae.  Dr. Mitchell is currently working on Christian Bioethics: A Guide for Pastors, Health Care Professionals, and Families with D. Joy Riley, MD (Broadman & Holman, 2013) and serving as co-editor of the Zondervan International Dictionary of Christian Bioethics to be published in 2014.