With the beginning of the Advent Season a few days away, I'm posting the last story box in my series with a theme appropriate for this special time of year. My new “Voices in the Wilderness” collage is about prophets, old and new. Much is made of their ability to foretell the future, but, in reality, prophets simply warn us with dire words of the likely consequences of actions we already know in our hearts to be wrong. Often putting their lives at risk, they dare to “speak truth to power.” The Hebrew Scriptures abound with stories of prophets, seen here in color reproductions of artworks from Great Masters like Michelangelo and Rembrandt, taking us from Moses to John the Baptist (with my inclusion of Miriam, Deborah, and Anna in the Temple!) They are paired with 14 modern truth-tellers in black and white portrait photos whose messages have resonated with me. A solitary Jesus laments the fate of prophets in a visual strip at the bottom, looking out over heaps of dried bones and the Manhattan skyline with a text bloc as true in meaning as ever. Four out of my 14 modern prophets were gunned down by assassins and another two were killed in prison. So, where are the "voices in the wilderness" now when we need them most? Perhaps, the lone few who speak words of truth cannot be heard over the high decibel babble of all the false prophets on the social media. (John Kohan)