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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. His dissertation, titled “Foundations of scholastic christology
in the Summa halensis,” studied early Franciscan christology (especially the work of Alexander of Hales and his school) and its place in the development of thirteenth-century approaches to the person and work of Jesus.
Before beginning his doctorate
at Boston College Dr. Belfield earned a B.A. at St. Bonaventure University, where he received departmental awards in theology and philosophy and was named the Ideal Bonaventure Man. He then pursued an M.T.S. at Loyola University Maryland; his thesis
on the motive for the incarnation according to the Franciscan scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus won him the Award for Research in Theology.
Beyond his academic work, Dr. Belfield has also worked at various times as a lifeguard, a swimming instructor, a restaurant dishwasher, a nighttime janitor, a resident assistant, and a campus minister.
To study theology is to ask questions of and about 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 a community or tradition.
Ultimately, as a teacher
Dr. Belfield invites his students to inhabit, if only provisionally, this community of thinking about God, asking its questions, assessing its answers, and communicating these ideas effectively.
Dr. Belfield is currently revising his dissertation for publication. He is also, together with Eric Mabry of Saint Mary’s Seminary & University, producing an English translation of Book 3 of Alexander of Hales’s Gloss on the Four Books
of Peter Lombard’s Sentences.
In addition to these projects, Dr. Belfield has research interests in trinitarian theology, soteriology, poverty, apocalypticism (medieval and contemporary), and liberation theologies.