Board Members

Patrick Troude Chastenet (ex officio)

Patrick Troude Chastenet is emeritus professor of political science at the University of Bordeaux. He was Jacques Ellul’s student assistant in the 1970s. His books include Lire Ellul (1992), Jacques Ellul on Politics, Technology, and Christianity (2005), Jacques Ellul penseur sans frontières (2005), and Comment peut-on (encore) être ellulien au XXIème siècle? (2014). He is the founding president of the Association Internationale Jacques Ellul, director of Cahiers Jacques Ellul, and a founding board member of IJES. He has organized several international colloquia on Ellul’s thought and legacy.

Geri Forsberg (Co-President)

Geri Forsberg (BA, Washington State University; MA, International School of Theology; MA, PhD New York University) earned her PhD under Neil Postman. Her dissertation, “Critical Thinking in an Image World,” gleaned from the works of media ecologists, including Jacques Ellul. She serves on the English faculty at Western Washington University. Her recent published 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  

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 the editor, with Donald Phillip Verene, of Essays in Humanity and Technology. He is co-translator of Ellul’s The Empire of Non-Sense. He 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 the Prairie Schooner, the literary magazine of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and in the Modern Arts/Midwest, Midtown gallery in Omaha, Nebraska.

Albert Moritz    

Albert F. Moritz (PhD, Marquette) is the Blake C. Goldring Professor of the Arts and Society at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. His doctoral work 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 books include Sequence (2015), The New Measures (2012), and The Sentinel (2008).

Ken Morris   (Secretary-Treasurer)

Ken Morris is 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.

Matt Prior   

Matt has been ordained in the Church of England since 2005 and has been lecturer in ethics at St. Mellitus College 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 on Ellul, 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). He is married to Esther, who grew up in Zimbabwe, and so he has been a regular visitor to Southern Africa over the past twenty years.

Lisa Richmond (Executive Director)     

Lisa Richmond is vice president of research at Cardus, a think tank in Hamilton, Ontario. She has been the editor of the Ellul Forum and translated Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World (Cascade, 2016). She holds an MA in theology, MLIS in library and information studies, and PhD in 17th-century French literature.

Elisabetta Ribet                       

Elisabetta Ribet is an Italian theologian and Protestant pastor. She holds a master’s 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” (Provoking Hope: Current Theological Perspectives in the Work of Jacques Ellul) was completed under professor Frédéric Rognon. Through her research and Italian translations of Ellul’s work (L’impossible prière, Propagandes), she has focused on another major topic of study: the questions and the definition of “public theology” in the European, mostly French and Italian, contexts. From 2018 to 2023, she taught practical theology, ecumenism, and ethics at the Faculty of Protestant Theology in Strasbourg.

Jacob Marques Rollison (Co-President)

Jacob Marques Rollison 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.

Christian Roy           

Christian Roy (PhD, McGill, 1993) 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 (having, for instance, 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 (ABC-Clio, 2005). He is soon to begin translating Ellul’s Théologie et technique.

Jacob Van Vleet   

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 (Fortress Press, 2014) and the editor of Jacques Ellul: Essential Spiritual Writings (Orbis Books, 2016).

Langdon Winner         

Langdon Winner (PhD, California) is Thomas Phelan Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is a political theorist interested in the ways in which technology affects the quality of social and political life. He is author of Autonomous Technology, The Whale and the Reactor, and other works, and his long-standing involvement with popular culture includes an earlier life as rock critic for Rolling Stone. His blog “Technopolis” offers commentary on political artifacts in humanity’s uncertain future. At present he is at work on a book, The Revolt Against Technology, a study of post-World War II American social thought.

Samir Younés        

Samir Younés is professor of architecture and associate dean at the University of Notre Dame, where he was also director of Rome studies. His books include Architectural Type and Character, The Imperfect City: On Architectural Judgment, The Historical Dictionary of Architecture, Quatremère de Quincy, Architects and Mimetic Rivalry, and The Intellectual Life of the Architect. He collaborated with David Lovekin on the translation of Jacques Ellul’s Empire of Non-Sense.