Research Program
Advancing Human Flourishing Through Economics, Artificial Intelligence, Leadership, and the Christian Intellectual Tradition
My scholarship explores a single, interdisciplinary question:
How do people, institutions, and technology work together to promote authentic human flourishing?
Drawing upon economics, artificial intelligence, leadership, Thomistic anthropology, and the Franciscan intellectual tradition, my research examines how human formation shapes rational agency, how institutions and markets influence decision-making, and how technological innovation can strengthen rather than diminish human dignity. Although each book addresses a distinct audience and discipline, together they form a coherent research program that seeks to reconnect economics, ethics, leadership, and public life within a unified framework centered on the dignity of the human person, responsible stewardship, and the common good.
The Formation of the Human Person
The foundation of my research begins with the human person. Economic systems, organizations, and public institutions ultimately reflect the decisions of the people who participate in them. Before examining markets or public policy, we must first understand how individuals develop the capacity for sound judgment, responsible action, and authentic freedom.
My Franciscan scholarship explores virtue, discernment, fraternity, stewardship, and the formation of character as essential dimensions of human development. These works examine how persons grow in wisdom and responsibility within families, communities, workplaces, and faith traditions, emphasizing that authentic social and economic renewal begins with the moral and spiritual formation of the human person.
Franciscan Economics and the Formation of Choice
The Franciscan intellectual tradition provides an essential bridge between personal formation and economic life. My Franciscan publications examine how virtue, fraternity, stewardship, care for creation, and the dignity of every person shape economic decisions and institutional life. Rather than viewing economics solely as the allocation of scarce resources, these works understand economic activity as fundamentally relational, grounded in human dignity and directed toward the common good.
The Virtuous Economy, The Virtuous Economy Workbook, The Bonfire of the Verities, and The Secular Franciscan Way of Life explore these themes by integrating Franciscan spirituality with contemporary questions of leadership, public policy, institutional trust, and economic responsibility. Together they argue that lasting reform begins not simply with better markets or better governments, but with better formed persons whose decisions shape families, organizations, and society.
These works establish many of the themes developed throughout my later scholarship, including stewardship, reciprocity, participation, institutional responsibility, human dignity, and long-term human flourishing.
Ordo Bonorum: A Thomistic Reconstrution of Economic Rationality extends this foundation into economic theory by asking a more fundamental question:
How do people become capable of making rational economic decisions?
Rather than treating preferences as fixed, the book develops the Ordo Bonorum Utility Framework, proposing that rational agency emerges through human formation, prudential judgment, participation, and the progressive ordering of goods toward human flourishing and, ultimately, beatitude. Drawing upon Thomistic anthropology while employing the analytical language of economics, the framework seeks to reconnect modern economic analysis with a richer understanding of the human person.
Artificial Intelligence as Intellectual Capital
Beyond Algorithms: Reframing AI as Intellectual Capital for Human Flourishing examines the role of artificial intelligence within this broader anthropology. Rather than viewing AI as a replacement for human judgment, the book argues that AI represents a new form of intellectual capital that augments human reasoning, expands access to knowledge, and strengthens informed decision-making while preserving the central role of human agency.
This perspective establishes the technological foundation for my subsequent work by demonstrating how AI can support rather than supplant the development of persons, organizations, and institutions.
Institutions, Markets, and Stakeholder Agency
Stakeholder Agency in the Age of AI: New Signals for a Post-Intervention Economic Era moves from the individual to society. Building upon the earlier foundations, it examines how formed persons, supported by AI-enabled information, generate ethical market signals that influence organizations, capital markets, and public institutions.
The book develops concepts including stakeholder agency, ethical capital, reciprocity, ethical elasticity, and decentralized market coordination as mechanisms through which markets increasingly recognize and reward organizations that contribute to long-term human flourishing. Rather than replacing market economics, it seeks to deepen our understanding of how institutions evolve when stakeholders possess greater knowledge, stronger agency, and improved decision-making capabilities.
Leadership and the Knowledge Economy
My continuing research extends these ideas into organizational leadership and the evolving knowledge economy.
Leaders Who Last applies the principles of human formation, dignity, stewardship, and long-term responsibility to organizational leadership, demonstrating how leaders cultivate institutions capable of flourishing across generations.
Ongoing research on artificial intelligence and the knowledge economy examines how AI is reshaping the creation, organization, and application of knowledge as a productive form of intellectual capital. Together, these works explore how leadership and technological innovation can strengthen institutions while remaining ordered toward the dignity of the human person.
An Integrated Vision
Viewed together, these publications are not independent projects but complementary parts of a single interdisciplinary research program. Each examines a different level of the same overarching inquiry:
How are persons formed?
How does formation cultivate rational agency?
How should artificial intelligence strengthen rather than replace human judgment?
How do institutions and markets encourage responsible participation?
How can leadership and public policy promote human flourishing across generations?
The progression moves from the formation of the person to the development of rational agency, from rational agency to institutional life, from institutions to markets, and from markets to the broader social, technological, and cultural systems that shape human flourishing.
My goal is to contribute to an ongoing interdisciplinary conversation that reconnects economics, ethics, leadership, artificial intelligence, theology, and public life within a coherent framework centered on the dignity of the human person, responsible stewardship, institutional renewal, and the pursuit of authentic human flourishing.