• MA in Medieval Philosophy (Queen’s University, Belfast, 1989)
• Lic. phil. (Université catholique de Louvain, 1991)
• DPhil (Université catholique de Louvain, 1995)
• DLitt (The National University of Ireland, 2020)

My interests are at the intersection of the Christian tradition and contemporary Continental thought. After a doctoral dissertation with a focus on Thomas Aquinas, whose ideas I tried to retrieve in Heideggerian fashion, I devoted much of my research to Peter Lombard, the author of the great Book of Sentences, which served as the standard textbook of theology over several centuries. This was an occasion to study the meaning of tradition. On that subject, I ended up writing a book combining biblical scholarship with philosophical notions inspired by Foucault. It appeared in 2018 under the title, Charred Root of Meaning.

My current work is concerned with the philosophy and theology of language. The question that haunts me, in particular, is this: Can we recover an understanding of language as the logos that holds together the world? Is the connection between the signifier and the signified really arbitrary, as modern linguistics teaches? I hope to have a book out on this within the next few years.

Before coming to the University of Kentucky, I taught in Belfast (N. Ireland), Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), Nkozi (Uganda), Dallas, and Maynooth (Ireland), with a visiting appointment at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). I am an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy and founding editor (now co-editor) of the series "Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations."