only in one’s choice—in one’s vote—it is crucial to become aware of our lesser natures, our racisms, venalities, and other aspects of humanity as they coalesce in injudicious court decrees, plutocracies, and hate movements. A coalition of many still begins with the single soul as reader of culture, in her solitude, voting her conscience.

Author: Nathan L. Grant
Nathan L. Grant is editor of the journal African American Review and associate professor of English at Saint Louis University. He is also the author of Masculinist Impulses: Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing and Modernity, and has written articles on literature, film, theater, and television, including essays on Countée Cullen, Ed Bullins, Frantz Fanon, August Wilson, Charles Burnett, and televisual black masculinity.Q:

Saul's name didn't necessarily change due to becoming a Christian

Up to this point I've considered that Saul's name changed to Paul when he became a Christian but that's not really true.
In Acts 13:9, the first time the name Paul is used, we read

9 But Saul, who was also known as Paul, filled with the Holy
Spirit, fixed his gaze on him,

meaning that the names were interchangeable.
Considering that Paul inherited the rights of Roman citizenship from his father (Acts 22:28) and that, as William Ramsay notes in St. Paul the traveler page 81,

It was the fashion for every Syrian, or Cilician, or Cappadocian, who prided himself on his Greek education and his knowledge of the Greek language, to bear a Greek name; but at the same time he had his