Advisory Council

Randy Ataide

Randy Ataide (MA, JD) is former professor of entrepreneurship and executive director of the Fermanian Business & Economic Institute at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. He teaches, writes, and speaks frequently about innovation, agriculture, competitive strategy, entrepreneurship, and related fields. While a fruit grower in California’s San Joaquin Valley, he took graduate courses in theology at Fresno Pacific Seminary and was profoundly affected by Jacques Ellul’s thinking as he studied with professor Mark Baker.

Mark Baker

Mark Baker holds an MA in biblical studies from New College Berkeley and a PhD in theology and ethics from Duke University. He is professor of mission and theology at Fresno Pacific Biblical Seminary and has written books and articles in English and Spanish, including some that interact with Ellul’s thought, such as Religious No More (1999) and Galatas (2014). He served as a guest editor of the Ellul Forum (#46).

Michael Bennett

Michael Bennett is associate research professor in Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. He has also held faculty positions at Northeastern University School of Law, Vassar College, the University of Michigan, Michigan Technological University, and the University of Virginia. His doctoral dissertation explored issues of “autonomous technology” and politics. He has published extensively, especially in a steady stream of provocative, theoretical articles in law journals. Michael holds the BS in applied physics from Florida A&M University, a JD from Harvard Law School, and a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (under Langdon Winner). Among his fields of study are nanotechnology policy, intellectual property, and science fiction and philosophy.

Stephanie Bennett

Stephanie Bennett is associate professor of communication and media studies at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida, where she teaches communication ethics, social issues in mass media, and seminars exploring the connections between technology, interpersonal communication, faith, and culture. Her doctoral dissertation was on “The Disappearance of Silence: A Dialectical Exploration of the Interpersonal Implications of Personal Mobile Media as Viewed Through the Lens of Jacques Ellul’s la technique.” Her most recent book is Communicating Love: Staying Close in a 24/7 Media-Saturated Society.

Walter Brueggemann

Walter Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary. He is one of the world’s leading interpreters of the Old Testament and 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

Clifford Christians is emeritus professor of communications and media studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana. His PhD dissertation (Illinois, 1974) was on “Jacques Ellul’s La Technique in a Communications Context.” He is co-editor of Jacques Ellul: Interpretive Essays (1981) 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 (2000-2012) and was a founding member of IJES.

Robb Davis

Robb Davis holds a master’s degree in public health and a PhD in population dynamics from Johns Hopkins University. He has over twenty years’ experience in international development in the field of maternal and child health and nutrition. He was executive director of the Mennonite Central Committee. He was elected to the Davis, California, city council in June, 2014 and became mayor in July, 2016. Robb’s article “Our Food System Equation” (Fall 2010) and interview “Bringing Ellul to the City Council” (Fall 2016) appeared in the Ellul Forum.

Jérôme Ellul

Jérôme Ellul is a photographer, film-maker, and “family archivist,” whose current major project is a documentary introduction to the life and thought of his grandfather, Jacques Ellul.  Jérôme is the son of Jean Ellul, eldest son of Jacques and Yvette Ellul. Jerome 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 (President Emeritus)

David Gill 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 free-lance 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

Andrew Goddard earned his PhD at Oxford University and is the author of Living the Word, Resisting the World: The Life and Thought of Jacques Ellul, the definitive English language introduction to Ellul’s life and thought. He served as a member of the Faculty of Theology in Oxford University from 1999 to 2008 and as 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.

Jeff Greenman

Jeffrey Greenman (MA, Oxford; PhD, Virginia) is president and professor of theology and ethics at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. Jeff is author, co-author, or editor of eleven books, including Understanding Jacques Ellul (2012), The Sermon on the Mount Through the Centuries, and The Decalogue Through the Centuries. Prior to his career in theological higher education he held government posts in education and juvenile justice and was Canadian executive director of African Enterprise, a mission organization focused on evangelism, leadership development, and racial reconciliation in urban Africa.

Joyce Hanks

Joyce Main Hanks (PhD, Washington University) taught French in Costa Rica and Argentina and served until her retirement as professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania. She is the translator of several books by Jacques Ellul, including The Humiliation of the Word (1985), Jesus and Marx (1988), and Reason for Being (1990). Her extraordinary and relentless research also produced Jacques Ellul: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1984, with later follow-up volumes) and the 500-page masterpiece, The Reception of Jacques Ellul’s Critique of Technology: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings 0n His Life and Thought (2007).  Joyce was a founding board member of IJES.

Virginia Landgraf   

Ginny Landgraf is an indexer-analyst at the American Theological Library Association. She wrote her PhD dissertation, “Abstract Power and the God of Love: A Critical Assessment of the Place of Institutions in Jacques Ellul’s Anthropology of Dialectical Relationships,” under Max Stackhouse at Princeton Theological Seminary. She has presented and published on Jacques Ellul’s interpretation of Sennacherib in Second Kings and on readings of the Ten Commandments that can be derived from Ellul’s work. She is a frequent contributor to the Ellul Forum. Recently she contributed an essay to Réforme on the reception of Jacques Ellul in the USA.  In 1988-1990 she was in Thailand serving with the US Peace Corps and studying Thai music.

Bruce MacKay

Bruce Mackay is the son of missionaries in South India but moved to New Zealand in 1960. He has degrees in horticulture, landscape architecture, and ecology. He has worked extensively in local government and private practice as a landscape designer, recreation planner, and ecologist in New Zealand and the UK for over thirty years. He has been involved with the South Pacific Christian Anarchist movement and with small Christian Anabaptist groups in Birmingham, UK (Peace Church) and in Hamilton, New Zealand (Ex-iles). He discovered Ellul’s work in about 1978. Eager to read untranslated works of Ellul, he embarked on a translation of Ellul’s Islam and Judeo-Christianity, which was published in 2015.

Randal Marlin              

Randal Marlin is a graduate of Princeton, McGill, and Toronto universities (PhD, 1973). Since 1966 he has taught in the department of philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, currently as adjunct research professor. 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. In 1982 he translated Ellul’s FLN Propaganda in France during the Algerian War into English. In 2014 he co-organized the Ellul conference in Ottawa. His Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (2002, 2d ed., 2013) has been widely cited, and his thoughts on Ellul and propaganda have appeared in numerous publications.

Carl Mitcham

Carl Mitcham is professor of liberal arts and international studies at the Colorado School of Mines and and a professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Earlier he served as director of the Science, Technology, and Society program at Penn State. He is an eminent philosopher of technology, and the author, editor, or co-editor of many works, including Philosophy and Technology (1972), Theology and Technology (1984), The Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics (rev., 2005), and the standard introduction to the field, Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy (1994).  He is a founding board member of IJES.

Michael Morelli

Michael Morelli, PhD, is assistant dean of undergraduate studies at Northwest Seminary and College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He recently completed his doctorate at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, which focused 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.

Jeffrey Shaw

Jeff Shaw (PhD, Salve Regina) is associate professor of strategy and policy in the College of Distance Education at Salve Regina University, Rhode Island. He is the author of Illusions of Freedom: Thomas Merton and Jacques Ellul on Technology and the Human Condition (2014) and editor of Jacques Ellul on Violence, Resistance, and War (2016). He is co-editor of Wars of Religion: An Encyclopedia of Faith and Conflict and co-author of The Reformers on War, Peace, and Justice: A Survey. Jeff received an MA in military history from the American Military University and in national security studies from the Air Command and Staff College (USA).

Richard Stivers

Richard Stivers is emeritus professor of sociology at Illinois State University. He is the author of many acclaimed critical studies of technology, ethics, and culture, such as Evil in Modern Myth and Ritual (1983), The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline (1994), Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational (1999), Hair of the Dog (rev. ed., 2000), Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society (2004), and The Illusion of Freedom and Equality (2008).

Sue Wentworth

Sue F. Wentworth (PhD, Emory University), now a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, served for many years as a lay leader and liturgist for St. Mary’s Church (Roman Catholic) and St. Margaret’s Church (Episcopal) in Annapolis, Maryland. Prior to this she taught systematic theology as an adjunct professor at Candler School of Theology, Emory, and was manager of public affairs for Cox Enterprises. Her article “‘On the Lookout for the Unexpected’: Ellul as Combative Contemplative” appeared in the July 2013 Ellul Forum.