Alum Bonnie J. Flessen Publishes Frontier Man

LSTC is proud to announce that alum Dr. Bonnie J. Flessen, PhD ’10, has published a new novel, Frontier Man, with Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Set in the first-century Roman world, Frontier Man follows Batos, a former Roman cavalryman who once served on the North African frontier. Now traveling as a watchman with a theater troupe proclaiming the good news of Jesus of Nazareth, Batos moves through the cities and roads of Asia Minor carrying the weight of a mysterious past. After a performance precipitates a riot in Pergamum, Batos encounters Domitia, a wealthy widow, and Virgos, an intersex person known to many as Eunuch. Together, the three set out for Thessalonica, hoping to hear the teachings of Paul for themselves. Along the journey, each traveler encounters new ways of experiencing freedom, community, and resistance, as the novel explores the possibility that resisting Roman rule and following Jesus might be one and the same.

Frontier Man draws deeply on Flessen’s scholarly work in New Testament studies and the Roman world. Her earlier monograph, An Exemplary Man: Cornelius and Characterization in Acts 10 (2011), examined masculinity in the first-century Roman Empire, and that research directly informed the historical texture and narrative architecture of the novel. Reflecting on the relationship between her academic work and her fiction, Flessen explains, “The historical sources that feed the New Testament—both literary and material—feed the narrative and keep it grounded.”

Although Frontier Man is Flessen’s first work of fiction, it is shaped by long-standing scholarly interests and methods. She has described the project as an exercise in what Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza calls historical imagination, using the tools of exegesis to construct a story that is historically precise, theologically responsible, and able to be exegeted. Dreams, visions, and apocalyptic imagery play a central role in the novel, particularly in the inner life of Batos, allowing the narrative to engage questions of freedom, violence, and hope in innovative ways.

The novel also highlights the role of theater as a means of spreading the message of Jesus of Nazareth in a largely non-literate society, while simultaneously offering a critique of emperor worship. The performances depicted in Frontier Man are fluid and evolving, shaped by audience, place, and political context, and they create space for resistance and participation beyond elite, text-based forms of communication.

In addition, Frontier Man foregrounds the natural world as a site of meaning and revelation. Drawing on her upbringing on a farm in rural Illinois, Flessen weaves plants, animals, and landscapes into the narrative as active participants in the story. Biblical resonances from the Psalms, the Prophets, and Revelation inform this ecological dimension, with signs and omens emerging through the presence of animals and the dangerous beauty of certain plants.

Flessen is the author of Frontier Man (2025) and An Exemplary Man: Cornelius and Characterization in Acts 10 (2011). She has taught as an adjunct instructor at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Her research explores the intersection of masculinity and resistance to the Roman Empire. Frontier Man is available in paperback from Wipf and Stock Publishers.