My research interests lie in social philosophy. Much of my work concerns community relationships, and how we can differentiate healthy communities from dysfunctional ones.

My dissertation, The Ideal Religious Community, explored the accounts of religious community found in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. There I argue that communities are built upon relationships of thick trust, and that the strongest communities are those that present conditions most conducive to the growth of such trust. My goal in this project was to provide a theoretical framework for describing what, exactly, goes wrong when religious communities fall into extremism and violence. I argue that these are the product of broken community relationships, predicated by a lack of trust among the members of the group.

My post-dissertation work continues to explore trust in community relationships. My current project examines the traditional distinction between interpersonal and social trust, and seeks to determine what is different about trusting a group versus trusting an individual.