While drawing on an extensive body of scholarship, Crosby's textured analysis of selfhood hews closely to lived experience. It is this experiential orientation that makes Crosby's work accessible to a non-philosophical audience. Crosby also provides an antidote to certain strains of personalist thinking that reduce the person to a "system of relationships." While giving transcendence and relatedness their due (especially in light of such moral phenomena as value response and obligation), Crosby takes pains to anchor relationality in a prior understanding of the person as a unique individual, characterized by self-possession and incommunicability.