• THFS 101. The Way of Francis & Clare
• THFS 235. Catholic Theology
• THFS 261. Jesus through the Centuries
• THFS 342. Bonaventure—Life & Writings
• THFS 360. Early Christian History to the Reformation

• Ph.D. in Historical Theology, Boston College, 2021
• M.T.S., Loyola University Maryland, 2017
• B.A. in Theology & Philosophy, St. Bonaventure University, 2015

• Apprenticeship in College Teaching, Boston College, 2022

Dr. Belfield earned his Ph.D. from Boston College, where he was trained in historical and systematic theology and specialized in medieval theology, christology, and Franciscan theology. He joined the theology & Franciscan studies faculty at St. Bonaventure University in 2021.

Prior to his academic work, Dr. Belfield worked at various times as a lifeguard, a swimming instructor, a restaurant dishwasher, a nighttime janitor, a resident assistant, and a campus minister.

• “Hypostases in Christ and the Work of Scholastic Christology: The Summa halensis and Albert the Great’s Commentary on the Sentences,” Franciscan Studies (forthcoming)
• “Medieval Receptions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christology, eds. Timothy Pawl and Michael Peterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

To study theology is to ask questions about God and things pertaining to God, and to think critically about possible answers. Students of theology don’t do this unaided; in the archive that is the history of Christian theology sits an enormous catalog of methods, questions, approaches, answers, and discussions from a diversity of thinkers, traditions, and communities.

Dr. Belfield’s teaching aims, in part, to show students how to explore that archive and put its materials to use as they navigate these fundamental questions of human existence and divine reality. In this way, Dr. Belfield conveys to his students the wide diversity of Christian thinking about God while also modeling intellectual work as always embedded in communities or traditions.

Ultimately, as a teacher Dr. Belfield invites his students to inhabit, if only provisionally, these communities of thinking about God: asking their questions, assessing their answers, and communicating these ideas effectively.

Dr. Belfield’s research focuses on the many and varied patterns of medieval scholastic thinking about Jesus Christ and his saving work. Of particular interest to Dr. Belfield is the reception of Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus homo (Why God Became Human) among the early Franciscan theologians at the University of Paris, and how their reinterpretation of Anselm’s satisfaction theory gave shape to their christology.

In addition to this research, Dr. Belfield is interested in scholastic trinitarian theology, poverty, and apocalypticism (medieval and contemporary). Dr. Belfield also has long-standing but growing interests in liberation theologies and film as a medium for theological reflection.