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. Julie Clawson wrote positively of this book, writing that she appreciated Batstone's "audacity in telling story after story of modern-day slavery." While still a student, Batstone studied under William R. Herzog, who taught Batstone about the
parables of Jesus. Batstone is an advocate of
workplace spirituality, about which he wrote in his 2003 book
Saving the Corporate Soul. He is also a
liberation theologian who considers
postmodernity an
era in which "we wallow in private affluence while squatting in public squalor." An anti-slavery activist, at the 2012 Freedom and Honor Conference in
Korea, a conference about
slavery and human trafficking, Batstone was one of the two keynote speakers. Born in
Illinois, Batstone graduated from
Chillicothe Township High School in 1976. 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. His doctoral thesis in liberation theology was entitled
From Conquest to Struggle: Jesus of Nazareth in the Liberation Christology of Latin America. ==References==