Meet Ben

I am a researcher and writer with heartfelt questions about the ways Christians in the United States relate to the rest of the world.

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My PhD (higher education, Azusa Pacific University) provided an opportunity to explore how people learn and grow and how educational sectors become ideological battlegrounds. My dissertation is a regional study of Palestinian colleges and universities in the occupied West Bank. In short, I found that Palestinian educators and learners navigate features of the Israeli occupation--physical, bureacratic, psychological, and epistemological features--as they pursue an education that seeks to nurish Palestinian roots in the land.

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In my work with Churches for Middle East Peace (Director of Academics and Grants) and with the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East (Director), I daily observe problematic ways that religous beliefs interact with contemporary politics. These organizations seek to offer education and advocacy to help Christian communities see and pursue Jesus' ethics of peace, justice, and nonviolence for the Middle East.

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I am working on a book about the ways American Christians perceive and conceive of places around them, the cultural myths about land that they adopt and adapt, and the ways that Christians can recover a more faithful, historic relationship to the physical world. The book, tentatively titled Pilgrimage in Place: Every Somewhere Sacred, is due out with InterVarsity Press in 2025.