Susan Grove Eastman, Ph.D., associate research professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, has written a new book reframing the Apostle Paul’s understanding of human identity and personhood through explorations of ancient and contemporary conceptions of the self.

The book, Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul's Anthropology, was published by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. in October and has a foreword by John M. G. Barclay, Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University in England.

In the book, Eastman reframes Paul’s understanding of persons within his first-century context, through the writings of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, and within a twenty-first century context, through attention to recent trends in psychology and neurobiology. The resulting interdisciplinary conversation illuminates Paul’s participatory theology in new ways and brings his voice into current philosophical and scientific debates about human distinctiveness, suffering, and flourishing.

Eastman, whose scholarly focus is on Paul’s letters in relationship to the formation and transformation of Christian identity, is the also the author of Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue: Language and Theology in Galatians.