Blood & Stone: Violence in the Bible & the Eye of the Illustrator

Cross Currents, Summer, 2001 by Barry Moser

Engravings from The Holy Bible: King James Version (Barry Moser, Illustrator), courtesy of R. Michelson Galleries, Northampton, Mass., www.rmichelson.com.

Barry Moser published his irreverent take on the Three Little Pigs (Little Brown) just as the term ended at Smith College where he taught, with Karl Donfried, a course on the Bible as art. This fall he will be the Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Louisville, and the Geneva Lecturer at Queens College, Kingston.

Notes

(1.) Barry Moser, The Three Little Pigs (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 2001).

(2.) The New Union Prayerbook, 211.

(3.) Ibid., 208.

(4.) Mark Twain, The Bible According to Mark Twain, ed. Baetzhold and McCullough (New York: Touchstone Press, 1995), 319-20.

(5.) Sara Bullard, "Gangstawulf: Examining the Allure of Violence in Lyric Form," Teaching Tolerance (Spring 1998): 16.

(6.) In an unsolicited review of the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible posted on amazon.com.

(7.) Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961), 31.

(8.) Ibid., 91.

(9.) A term I borrow from the Rev. David Smith, pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi.