| David Batstone | |
| Birth Name: | David Bruce Batstone |
| Birth Date: | 4 April 1958 |
| Birth Place: | Illinois, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Ethics professor |
| Tradition Movement: | liberation theology |
| Main Interests: | Human trafficking, slavery |
| Notable Works: | Not for Sale, Saving the Corporate Soul |
David Batstone (born April 4, 1958) is an ethics professor at the University of San Francisco and is the founder and president of Not for Sale.[1]
Batstone is also a journalist and the president and founder of Right Reality, an international business that engages in social ventures.[2] He is a leader in Central American Mission Partners, a human rights group. As a representative of this group, he met with Bono through Glide Memorial Church during A Conspiracy of Hope, a concert tour in support of Amnesty International.[3] Before becoming a human rights activist, Batstone was a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.[4]
Batstone wrote the book Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade - and How We Can Fight It, in which he wrote about human trafficking and how social inequality and poverty make it easy for traffickers to find girls to traffick.[5] Julie Clawson wrote positively of this book, writing that she appreciated Batstone's "audacity in telling story after story of modern-day slavery."[6] While still a student, Batstone studied under William R. Herzog, who taught Batstone about the parables of Jesus.[7] Batstone is an advocate of workplace spirituality, about which he wrote in his 2003 book Saving the Corporate Soul.[8] He is also a liberation theologian who considers postmodernity an era in which "we wallow in private affluence while squatting in public squalor."[9] An anti-slavery activist,[10] at the 2012 Freedom and Honor Conference in Korea, a conference about slavery and human trafficking, Batstone was one of the two keynote speakers.[11]
Born in Illinois,[12] Batstone graduated from Chillicothe Township High School in 1976.[13] He then earned a B.A. degree in psychology from Westmont College in 1980. Batstone received an M.Div. degree from the International Baptist Seminary in Switzerland in 1982 and a second M.Div. degree from the Pacific School of Religion in 1984. He completed his Ph.D. degree in systematic theology at the Graduate Theological Union in 1989.[14] His doctoral thesis in liberation theology was entitled From Conquest to Struggle: Jesus of Nazareth in the Liberation Christology of Latin America.[15]