Duke Divinity School Professor C. Kavin Rowe has written a book exploring the promise and problems in engaging rival philosophical claims about truth.

The new book, One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, has been published by Yale University Press and is a cross-disciplinary work of philosophy and biblical studies.

In the book, Rowe suggests that in a world of religious pluralism there is negligible gain in sampling from separate belief systems by juxtaposing the Roman stoics Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius with the Christian saints Paul, Luke, and Justin Martyr, while incorporating the contemporary views of Jeffrey Stout, Alasdair McIntyre, Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Pierre Hadot, and others.

In reconceiving the relationship between ancient philosophy and emergent Christianity as a rivalry between strong traditions of life, Rowe, a new Testament scholar, argues for the exclusive commitment to a community of belief and a particular form of philosophical life as the path to existential truth.