God Speaks to Modern Man
Lickey
1963
It’s like Jesus just shows up at the office. Does he have an appointment?
Regardless of how you might feel about religious materials, you just gotta love these illustrations. What’s not to love? Giant Jesus at the UN or perhaps a sad David Schwimmer look alike contemplating good versus evil. (Hint: The devil has a mustache.) In other pictures, he looks like a mean William Powell or Snidley Whiplash.
Mary
The woman in the blue coat (second to last picture) should have gloves with it. That’s why the sleeves are so short.
I think she lost her gloves in the time travel event that dropped them in the Roman empire circa 35 a.d. Or that sneaky Satan tricked her out of them. . .
Does anyone else see a weird video screen in Hollis’s comment?
That’s not a coat – it’s what was tastefully referred to in the 50s and 60s as a coatdress. Sad to say, I had one in my teens
What, no token ethnic “characters”?
Um I think there is one, He happens to be the Devil hiding behind that tree.
Nope, he appears to be white, too, to appeal to all those clean cut white folks in this book. We shouldn’t think that the devil discriminates, but that’s apparently true here.
Of course there are there; good angel blond hair and clean shaven, fallen angel, swarthy face and black hair. Add to that, a widow’s peak, and pointed up moustache and eyebrows.
And you know that the fallen angel is sporting a DA in the back of that head.
(For the younger set, D = Duck. A = well, you figure it out.)
Socks and sandals? Give up angel, your gothier opponent has already won. 😉
Giant Jesus looks like he’s knocking on the side of the UN.
The devil is barefoot. I think both the devil and the angel are telling this fashion faux pas to get the heck off their seat.
I believe egl was referring to the contemplating sinner, who is surely bound for hell given those socks with the sandals.
Am I the only one who thinks that the devil in that pic looks like Robert Downey Jr?
Again, in the 60s and 70s, those were referred to as Fisherman’s or Jesus Sandals. The socks, eh.
Hahaha! To complete the nerd look, there should be some pens in his shirt pocket. Meanwhile, cool Satan goes barefoot.
He’s very tall, isn’t he?
That last lady looks like Natalie Wood. And the guy on the left in the next to last picture looks like Peter Facinelli. If anybody knows a lot of celebrities, it’s God.
The devil hiding behind the tree, looks like a bad version of Clark Gable.
I was thinking Vincent Price.
Maybe a combination of both Clark and Vincent. I just noticed that he has, long, pink, and manicured nails. Not bad for a devil. .Having a busy schedule leading people astray, he still has time do his nails, and in pink!
Jesus came to my office one day by way of a screen savior….
Ha!
Satan looks like he’s trying to decide which of these ladies he should tie to the railroad tracks first.
I was more worried about the young girls!
I like how Nordic “Jesus” is. You’d never know he was *gasp* Middle Eastern
Jesus talking to Colonel Sanders on the cover.
…as played by Norm McDonald.
Blue Coat Lady (second to last picture) seems to be being Force-choked by Darth Vader.
He looks like Jeffrey Hunter in “King of Kings” from the same era. That picture of Jesus at the UN is familiar to me; it may have been on the wall in Sunday School.
The grammar is what bothers me. It should say “… He [not Him] who suffered there.” The whole clause is the object of the verb “contemplate,” and because it is a clause, it requires a subject to lead into its verb.
But you’re giving “preceive” a pass?
the angel kind of looks like Christopher Walken and Satan looks like an aging Robert Downey Jr. The guy in the middle looks like a contemplative David Schwimmer. I think this book should be a keeper based on these pictures alone!!!!
Love giant Jesus knocking on the UN. Hope they followed it up with a picture of him perched on the Empire State Building swatting at biplanes.
Praying to Jesus that you stop messing with the comment rating system-PLEASE!
We have had problems with the plug in, we are still working on it. Hang in there!
cover: you’ve got his interest – close the interview jesus!
What a jolt of nostalgia, that title font on the cover gave me. As a preteen in the 1960s, I spent as many Sunday mornings as possible in the musty library in the church basement instead of upstairs listening to long sermons. The church library was filled with books that had pictures and type like this one. But it also had the Narnia books!
The man with the bible on the last page reminds me of Mitt Romney (why as a non-American I can see that must be down to all the US election coverage we get in Australia). No Donald Trump look-alikes though.
As he gets older, the good and blond angel, could easily manage the Donald Trump hairdo.
I need this book!!! I still regret years ago not picking up a painting of the giant Jesus knocking on the UN building I found at a flea market. It was like a high school kid repainted it for art class.
There should be an art category for “religious tract garish.” This particular book is by the Seventh-Day Adventists, but there are similar illustrations in Jehovah’s Witnesses and LDS publications. [Public libraries receive donations from all of these groups.]
I am a little surprised that no one has picked up on what is actually going on here. “God Speaks to Modern Man” is a Seventh-day Adventist evangelistic books from the early 1960s, published by the main Adventist press, the Review and Herald (which, as a tipoff, copyrighted the illustrations). The pictures were done by Harry Anderson, a devout Adventist and widely noted religious illustrator of the time; the picture of Christ at the UN is one of his best known and is called “Prince of Peace.” When I was attending an Adventist university in the 1960s, I spent a summer in San Francisco selling books of this type; Adventists call it “literature evangelism” or “colporteuring.:” i can understand the reactions to the illustrations at a distance of over 50 years, and I have no special investment in the issue; I left the Adventist Church over 30 years ago. But it occurred to me that those interested in this matter might like some background as to what they are actually seeing here. (The Adventist Church, incidentally, would likely not illustrate books in quite this way now. It is an American-origin religious group and in the 1960s its membership and emphasis were much more heavily North American/European than is now the case. Like the Catholic Church, its main area of growth has been overseas.)