Bio and Research Interests
After graduating from Wheaton College, Illinois, I came to Boston College to complete my Ph.D. in Philosophy. There I wrote my dissertation: Between Faith and Science: Gregory of Rimini on theological knowledge in his fourteenth-century context (2012). I now reside at Loyola University Maryland as an assistant professor of philosophy.
I am a specialist in high and late medieval philosophy and theology, and I have been trained in Latin paleography. I am especially interested in the question of method in reasoning and its impact for the cluster of questions surrounding the intersection of faith and reason. My expertise on the subject, while centered in the fourteenth century, extends back to Aristotle and forward to the Reformation and the modern period. Of particular interest is the medieval use of Aristotle's description of method and his division of the sciences in the construction of a coherent understanding of faith and theology.
My "Area of Competence" extends historically from Aristotle to Kant. Besides concerns with faith and reason and their extension into both medieval epistemology and metaphysics, I have strong interests in the traditional problems of Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysics, and Moral and Political Philosophy. The history of Moral and Political Philosophy, from Plato to Sartre, constituted the bulk of my teaching at Boston College. I have many projects on the horizon, including a book on Robert Holcot (fl. 1330s) and a reader tracing the scholastic roots of modern theories of human rights.
I also have a growing interest in the digital humanities and the process of moving philosophical texts from their original manuscript form to media more accessible to the community of scholars (View an example).