Board Members
Geri Forsberg (co-president) earned her PhD under Neil Postman at New York University, with a thesis that gleaned from the works of media ecologists, including Jacques Ellul. She serves on the English faculty at Western Washington University in Washington State. Her recent articles include “Introducing Jacques Ellul to English Education” (Explorations in Media Ecology), “Jacques Ellul’s Contributions to Media Literacy” (EME), and “Jacques Ellul: A Model of Border-Crossing” in Christianity and the Secular Border Patrol: The Loss of Judeo-Christian Knowledge, eds. Barry Kanpol and Mary Poplin.
David Lovekin is professor of philosophy emeritus at Hastings College in Nebraska. He is the author of Technique, Discourse, and Consciousness: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jacques Ellul, and co-editor of Essays in Humanity and Technology. He is co-translator of Ellul’s The Empire of Non-Sense. David has published numerous essays on Ellul and Giambattista Vico that deal with technology as a problem for the philosophy of culture in the spirit of Ernst Cassirer, with the idea of technology as a symbolic form. He has received five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His photography has been published in many books and periodicals, such as Prairie Schooner, the literary magazine of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and in the Modern Arts/Midwest, Midtown gallery in Omaha, Nebraska.
Jacob Marques-Rollison (co-president) is an independent researcher living in Switzerland. His PhD studies at the University of Aberdeen focused on Ellul’s theological ethics. His revised thesis, A New Reading of Jacques Ellul: Presence in the Postmodern World, was published by Lexington Books / Fortress Academic. He has translated Ellul’s two-volume introduction to Christian ethics, To Will & To Do. With Jacob Van Vleet, he is co-author of Cascade Companions: Jacques Ellul. He holds an MA in media and communication from the European Graduate School, and a BA in economics from Wheaton College in Illinois.
Michael Morelli, PhD, is assistant dean of undergraduate studies at Northwest Seminary and College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He completed his doctorate at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, with a focus on theology, ethics, and technology in the work of Jacques Ellul and Paul Virilio. Michael studies theological ethics, meaning that he is fascinated by the ways that God’s truth confronts and changes the realities that make up our existence. Prior to his return to the theological academy, he worked in local church ministry, and he continues to serve the church in a lay capacity. He also publishes and presents on a variety of topics within the fields of theology, morality, culture, politics, and technology.
Albert Moritz is emeritus professor, Victoria University in the University of Toronto. His doctoral work at Marquette University was in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British poetry. His scholarship has tended toward social and cultural history: biographies of Emma Goldman and Stephen Leacock, studies of picturesque aesthetics in illustration in the first mass press during the nineteenth century, the historical/geographical Oxford Literary Guide to Canada. He is primarily a poet. His work has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Ingram Merrill Fellowship, the Griffin Prize, the Beth Hokin Prize of Poetry magazine, etc. Recent poetry volumes include Sequence, The New Measures, and The Sentinel.
Ken Morris (treasurer) is a civil attorney practicing in Boulder, Colorado. He received his JD from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He also has a MTS from Duke Divinity School and an MA in Christian ethics from New College Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, where he first became fascinated with Jacques Ellul’s work while studying under David Gill.
Matthew Prior has been ordained in the Church of England since 2005 and has been lecturer in ethics at St. Mellitus College in the UK since 2019. He is interested in the interface between technology and theology, both in terms of offering a coherent theological account of technology (the subject of his doctorate, published in 2020 as Confronting Technology: The Theology of Jacques Ellul) and of exploring theology and ethics in an age of rapid technological development. He has a BA and MA in theology (University of Bristol) and a BA in modern and medieval languages (University of Cambridge).
Lisa Richmond (executive director) is the vice president of research at Cardus, a think tank in Ontario. She is editor of the Ellul Forum and translator of Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World, among other works. She received her doctorate from the University of Montpellier III (Paul-Valéry) in France.
Elisabetta Ribet is an Italian theologian and Protestant pastor. She obtained a master’s degree from the Waldensian Faculty of Theology in Rome and a PhD from the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Strasbourg. Her dissertation, “La provocation de l’espérance. Perspectives théologiques actuelles dans l’œuvre de Jacques Ellul” was completed under professor Frédéric Rognon. She has translated into Italian Ellul’s L’impossible prière and Propagandes.
Christian Roy received his PhD from McGill University. He is an independent scholar of intellectual and cultural history, an art and cinema critic, and a translator from several European languages. A specialist of the French Personalist tradition (and has singled out its Bordeaux school around Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul as the cradle of political ecology), he has published his thesis and numerous articles on the subject, in addition to Traditional Festivals: A Multicultural Encyclopedia in two volumes. He is soon to begin translating Ellul’s Théologie et technique.
Patrick Troude Chastenet (ex officio, non-voting) is emeritus professor of political science at the University of Bordeaux, France. He was Ellul’s student assistant in the 1970s. His books include Lire Ellul; Jacques Ellul on Politics, Technology, and Christianity; Jacques Ellul penseur sans frontières; and Comment peut-on (encore) être ellulien au XXIème siècle?. He is a founding board member of IJES and founding president of the francophone sister society, Association Internationale Jacques Ellul. He has organized several international colloquia on Ellul’s thought and legacy.
Jacob Van Vleet teaches philosophy and comparative religion at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California. He holds a PhD from the California Institute of Integral Studies and MA degrees from the Dominican School of Philosophy and the Graduate Theological Union. He is the author of Dialectical Theology and Jacques Ellul and the editor of Jacques Ellul: Essential Spiritual Writings.
Honorary and Emeritus
Walter Brueggemann (honorary) is professor of Old Testament emeritus, Columbia Theological Seminary. He is the author of numerous books, including Genesis and First and Second Samuel in the Interpretation series, as well as An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination and Sabbath as Resistance: Saying NO to the Culture of Now.
Cliff Christians (emeritus) is emeritus professor of communications and media studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is co-editor of Jacques Ellul: Interpretive Essays and author or editor of thirteen books and hundreds of essays, chapters, articles, and reviews in the field of media ethics. He has been a distinguished scholar or visiting professor at Chicago, Princeton, and Oxford. He served as editor of the Ellul Forum from 2000 to 2012 and was a founding member of IJES.
Jérôme Ellul (honorary) is a photographer, film-maker, and unofficial family archivist. He is currently producing a documentary introduction to the life and thought of his grandfather, Jacques Ellul. Jérôme has participated in conferences of the Ellul Society, as well in colloquia and conversations in France, often sharing previews and rough cuts of his work-in-progress, providing rare audio and video glimpses of the life and work of Jacques Ellul.
David Gill (emeritus) earned his PhD at the University of Southern California with a dissertation on The Word of God in the Ethics of Jacques Ellul, subsequently published as the first of his seven books on theological or business ethics. He spent the sabbatical year 1984–85 and several summers in Bordeaux, meeting with Ellul and many Ellul scholars, family, and friends. He transitioned in June 2016 from a forty-year career as a business school and seminary professor of ethics to a freelance writer. He is the founding president of the International Jacques Ellul Society and a founding board member of the Association internationale Jacques Ellul.
Andrew Goddard (emeritus) obtained his PhD at Oxford University and is the author of Living the Word, Resisting the World: The Life and Thought of Jacques Ellul. He was a member of the Faculty of Theology, Oxford University from 1999 to 2008, and tutor in Christian ethics at Trinity College, Bristol from 2008 to 2011. He is now associate director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics at Tyndale House, Cambridge. Andrew was a founding board member of IJES.
Joyce Hanks (emeritus) received her PhD from Washington University and was professor in the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Scranton, Pennsylvania. She is the translator of several books by Jacques Ellul, including The Humiliation of the Word, Jesus and Marx, and Reason for Being. Her extraordinary and relentless research also produced Jacques Ellul: A Comprehensive Bibliography and The Reception of Jacques Ellul’s Critique of Technology: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings 0n His Life and Thought. Joyce was a founding board member of IJES.
Randal Marlin (emeritus) is a graduate of Princeton, McGill, and Toronto universities (PhD, 1973) and emeritus professor, Carleton University, Ottawa. In 1979–80 he won a Canadian Department of Defence fellowship supporting a year at the University of Bordeaux, where he studied under Jacques Ellul. He translated Ellul’s FLN Propaganda in France during the Algerian War. In 2014 he co-organized the Ellul conference in Ottawa. He is the author of Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, and his thoughts on Ellul and propaganda have appeared in numerous publications.
Carl Mitcham (emeritus) is professor of liberal arts and international studies at the Colorado School of Mines and professor at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Earlier he served as director of the Science, Technology, and Society program at Penn State. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of many works, including Philosophy and Technology; Theology and Technology; The Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics; and Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy. He was a founding board member of IJES.