This week's image of the Good Shepherd is part of one of my earliest major acquisitions for the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, a series of 25 colored monotypes and six etchings on the life of Christ by American Artist Eugene Higgins, commissioned in the 1940s for a religious lending library in Hartford, Connecticut. Few American art-makers have looked at the marginalized in society with so open and compassionate an eye as this son of impoverished Irish immigrants, who was associated with the early 20th century Ashcan School of American Social Realist art. Higgins did not follow sacred art conventions in creating his Life of Christ, focusing on the poverty of the Holy Family, the working class origins of the disciples, and Christ's message of hope to the downtrodden. Were Christ not dressed in biblical garb in this print, he could be easily mistaken for a farm hand in rural Connecticut, where Higgins spent his summers. The title is taken from Christ's description of himself as the Good Shepherd in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John. (John Kohan)