Growing up as a preacher’s kid in an evangelical church, Latimore was accustomed to a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus; it wasn’t until he went to college that he discovered a wider, richer world of Christian art. He painted or wrote, in iconographer parlance his first icon when he was a praying, hoeing member of a monastic farm in Ohio. When a fellow member asked what it meant to consider the lilies of the field, Latimore answered with an image of Jesus holding lilies and looking almost surprised by them.
Latimore’s icon Refugees: La Sagrada Familia
, in which the flight to Egypt is interpreted as Latinx immigrants crossing the desert, adorns the cover of Pope Francis’s book A Stranger and You Welcomed Me