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“I feel the need for new images (new icons),” writes Kelly Latimore, a self-taught St. Louis artist who began painting as a member of the Common Friars, a monastic order in the Episcopal Church. He has taken up the brush to explore issues of faith and justice, placing himself “in the patterns of the old images and yet making new images.” In Refugees: La Sagrada Familia, he draws on his experience of meeting a young immigrant who spoke of his travels through the desert and across the border to arrive in the United States.

Sarah Arthur captures the beloved Christian author’s appeal.

Can we cross them? Is it worth it?

Sarah Blake’s surrealist novel about Naamah—Noah’s wife—is mesmerizing.

This week, Adam and Matt talk with Nate Stucky about farming, harmony, theology, and the new film The Biggest Little Farm. 

“Much of my work is concerned with incongruity,” writes Texas artist Alice Leora Briggs. Using sgraffito on kaolin clay, she offers narratives that both instruct and confuse. She is tender in her renderings of humanity and clear about the inhumane ways people treat and label one another. She is especially drawn to the “narco-battered borderlands” of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, near El Paso, Texas, which for her is suggestive of other kinds of borderlands that humans experience.

Personal conversion is part of social change, but we can’t end our stories there.