Ben Robinson

For the majority of his adult life, Ben has been dedicated to the pursuit of racial and economic justice. To this end, he recently received his Ph.D. from Southern Methodist University in the field of Religion and Culture (2018), and also received a Master of Divinity from Duke Divinity School (2010). He has taught and spoken widely on the entanglements between Christianity, racism, and capitalism. His work deals with how Christianity helped invent––and continues to sustain––the systems of domination ensnaring us (what bell hooks refers to as “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy”), but has also been imagined differently by those on the underside to survive oppression and create alternatives based on meeting one another’s needs. As a LIVE FREE Fellow, the wisdom of these liberative alternatives guides his approach to mobilizing communities of faith. Ben wants to empower people to disbelieve that a carceral society is a safe society, and to radically reimagine together what it means to “live free.”