Religious Socialism Podcast · DSA Religion and Socialism Commission

Kelly Latimore | Iconography as Resistance

·43 min·2 clips

Kelly answers “Is it George Floyd or Jesus?” with “yes.”

Kelly Lattimore traces his religious upbringing. He says evangelical Christianity in the 90s often framed faith as a private path toward transcendence, and that left him with a lonely, damaging sense of what religion was for. He then describes a later turn in his twenties and after college as a time of change. That shift helped him recover faith as something more communal than solitary escape. The interview turns to his icons and murals. Lattimore explains why images of George Floyd, the refugee Holy Family, and Dorothy Day with a homeless Jesus matter to him: they ask viewers whose face they are willing to recognize as bearing the image of God. He treats art as a shared act. For him, an image is not just something to admire but a window that can reflect back both God and the viewer, exposing what communities value, resist, or ignore. The hosts keep pressing on the purpose of art. Lattimore points to the long history of pictures, from cave painting to modern art, as evidence that visual work has always shaped how people understand one another. He returns to the word communion. Art, he suggests, is mutual participation, a way of being with others rather than a solitary display. He also notes the loneliness of contemporary media habits. Phones and technology make it easy to consume images alone, cut off from the shared life that gave art much of its early force. In contrast, he imagines art as something that gathers people. The best art can bring people into solidarity. The conversation stays morally serious throughout, with attention to dehumanization, public suffering, and the call to see others differently without losing sight of the image and the human face. Lattimore closes by sharing where listeners can find his work. The episode leaves the sense that iconography can be both devotional and communal, asking viewers to meet the world differently.

As heard by us

Icons, solidarity, and the moral work of seeing.

Kelly Latimore's conversation treats icons as a way of looking at the divine and, maybe more uncomfortably, at ourselves. He connects that view to an evangelical childhood, then moves through images that place George Floyd, refugee families, and Dorothy Day in the same moral…

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Why you'd press play

You want art, faith, and solidarity held in the same frame.

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