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Benjamin Wildflower is a member of an AFL-CIO trade union who pursues his love of printmaking on the side. He calls the printmaking process a meditative one, but his images pack a punch. Most of them exhibit a grassroots Catholic Worker sensibility, offering political-religious commentary and a call to action. Many of his images focus on Mary and her song, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55), which speaks of the poor being raised up. “There are enough images out there focusing on the lowliness and meekness of Mary,” he writes.

Icons in the Byzantine style traditionally depict their subjects as fixed for all time in recognizable poses against symbolic backdrops. Charalambos Epaminonda, a Greek Orthodox painter from Cyprus, challenges these conventions in his image of the Sermon on the Mount. We know we have stepped into sacred space from the stylized figures, the flattened perspective, and the disproportionate size of the seated Christ, but the cubistic color fragments and spidery white lines vibrate with an energy very much of this world.

Iraqi-born (now US-based) artist Sinan Hussein is one of the painters represented in the traveling exhibit Abraham: Out of One, Many, now showing at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston (see news story “With exhibit on Abraham, Episcopal cathedral in Boston organizes interfaith conversation”). Welcoming the Stranger displays his signature interplay of surrealism, whimsy, and symbolism.