Stephen S. Sawyer

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Stephen Shelby Sawyer (born August 30, 1952, in Paris, KY, U.S.) is an American commercial illustrator known for his Christianist depictions of Jesus Christ, as well as for his business, Art 4 God. [1] His work has been profiled in magazines, over 400 newspapers including The New York Times , and TV shows such as The Today Show . Since 1995, Sawyer has traveled throughout the United States and occasionally to other countries as a motivational speaker. He resides in Versailles, Kentucky. [2]

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"How Great Thou Art" is a Christian hymn based on an original Swedish hymn entitled "O Store Gud" written in 1885 by Carl Boberg (1859–1940). The English version of the hymn and its title are a loose translation by the English missionary Stuart K. Hine from 1949. The hymn was popularised by George Beverly Shea and Cliff Barrows during Billy Graham's crusades. It was voted the British public's favourite hymn by BBC's Songs of Praise. "How Great Thou Art" was ranked second on a list of the favourite hymns of all time in a survey by Christianity Today magazine in 2001 and in a nationwide poll by Songs Of Praise in 2019.

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Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) is a 1954 oil-on-canvas painting by Salvador Dalí. A nontraditional, surrealist portrayal of the Crucifixion, it depicts Christ on a polyhedron net of a tesseract (hypercube). It is one of his best-known paintings from the later period of his career.

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The Hand of God, or Manus Dei in Latin, also known as Dextera domini/dei, is a motif in Jewish and Christian art, especially of the Late Antique and Early Medieval periods, when depiction of Yahweh or God the Father as a full human figure was considered unacceptable. The hand, sometimes including a portion of an arm, or ending about the wrist, is used to indicate the intervention in or approval of affairs on Earth by God, and sometimes as a subject in itself. It is an artistic metaphor that is generally not intended to indicate that a hand was physically present or seen at any subject depicted. The Hand is seen appearing from above in a fairly restricted number of narrative contexts, often in a blessing gesture, but sometimes performing an action. In later Christian works it tends to be replaced by a fully realized figure of God the Father, whose depiction had become acceptable in Western Christianity, although not in Eastern Orthodox or Jewish art. Though the hand of God has traditionally been understood as a symbol for God's intervention or approval of human affairs, it is also possible that the hand of God reflects the anthropomorphic conceptions of the deity that may have persisted in late antiquity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pre-existence of Christ</span> Existence of Christ before his incarnation as Jesus

The pre-existence of Christ asserts the existence of Christ prior to his incarnation as Jesus. One of the relevant Bible passages is John 1:1–18 where, in the Trinitarian interpretation, Christ is identified with a pre-existent divine hypostasis called the Logos. There are nontrinitarian views that question the aspect of personal pre-existence, the aspect of divinity, or both.

References

  1. "CHURCH RITUALS TRANSFORM ITEMS INTO SACRED OBJECTS". Lexington Herald-Leader . March 20, 1997. p. J2.
  2. Burling, Lori (March 22, 2003). "Painter imagines a modern Christ". Eugene Register-Guard . p. C19.