The Board of Directors and Dr. D. Joy Riley, Executive Director of the Tennessee Center for Bioethics and Culture, are pleased to announce that
C. Ben Mitchell, PhD,
has been appointed
Distinguished Fellow of the Center
effective September 1, 2020.
Dr. Mitchell most recently served as the Graves professor of moral philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, until his retirement at the end of August 2020. Prior to joining the Union faculty, he taught bioethics and contemporary culture for a decade at Trinity Graduate 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.
Mitchell 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 currently serves on the Ethics Committee of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations and served in 2020 on the National Institutes of Health Advisory Board on Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics. He has been 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.
Active in the faith and science conversation, Mitchell was a member of the Templeton-funded 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 regularly 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 has written extensively in bioethics and biotechnology. Some of his works are, Biotechnology and the Human Good (Georgetown University Press, 2007), co-authored with Edmund Pellegrino, Jean Bethke Elshtain, John Kilner, and Scott Rae; Christian Bioethics: A Guide for Pastors, Health Care Professionals, and Families with D. Joy Riley, MD (Broadman & Holman, 2014), and Ethics & Moral Reasoning: A Student’s Guide (Crossway, 2013).
