C. Ben Mitchell is a semi-retired professor of ethics who served most recently for more than a decade as the Graves Chair of Moral Philosophy at Union University where he also served for three years as Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs and Special Assistant to the President.
Prior to joining the Union faculty, he taught ethics, including bioethics and contemporary culture, for a decade at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where he was director of the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity from 2006-2008. He continues to serve there as an affiliate professor of bioethics. He taught at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1997-1999 and has led doctoral seminars in bioethics for Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, as well serving as an adjunct professor at Union University and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
He received his doctorate in philosophy with a concentration in medical ethics (with honors) from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. 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. He also received a Master of Divinity Degree (with biblical languages) from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas and a Bachelor of Science degree from Mississippi State University.
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.
In 2020, he served on the NIH Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Committee. He has been a consultant with the Center for Genetics & Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University and Co-Director for Biotechnology Policy and Fellow of the Council for Biotechnology Policy in Washington, D.C. He also has served as a Fellow of the Institute for Biotechnology and a Human Future at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago-Kent School of Law; and as a Fellow of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC. He currently serves as Distinguished Fellow of the Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture and a Fellow of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
He was a member of the Templeton Oxford Summer Symposium on Religion and Science (2003-2005). He received John Leland Religious Liberty Award by the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, September 2020 and in 2022, he received The Paul Ramsey Award for Excellence in Bioethics from the Center for Bioethics & Culture.
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 has been interviewed on radio and television, having appeared on National Public Radio, Fox News, MSNBC, and others. He has served on a hospital ethics committee for more than a decade.
Among other works, he is the author of How Do We Live in a Digital World (Lexham, 2021), Ethics and Moral Reasoning (Crossway, 2013) and a co-authored volume, with D. Joy Riley, MD, Christian Bioethics: A Guide for Pastors, Health Care Professionals, and Families (B&H, 2014). He edited for over 20 years Ethics & Medicine: An International Journal of Bioethics. Currently, he is co-editing with the ERLC's Jason Thacker a series of ethics volumes for B&H Academic called the "Ethics Essentials" series, in which he is to write a volume on medical ethics.
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