Since NPR’s recent segment, Sister Corita Kent has come to mind a few times this week as someone who deserves to be added to our Restless Souls’ Hall of Fame—yes, it’s a bit of a new concept here at this intersection, but I like it, and on occasion will be adding lesser-known figures like Sister Kent to its ranks. By “restless souls,” I mean the spiritual exiles of our time—people who are seeking after God and finding God in the world around them, often outside of mainstream, traditional church which has failed them.

Sister Kent, whose artwork is now on exhibit at the Andy Warhol Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, once headed the art department of Immaculate Heart College, in Los Angeles, California. Like Warhol, Kent used images from the advertising world and pop culture to fashion her creations, but in the case of Kent, a Catholic nun, these works were expressions of her Christian faith.

In this way, something as mundane as the slogan on a General Mills cereal box— “the Big G stands for Goodness”—which served as General Mills’ logo, could be transformed into a meditation on God Himself as “God,” “goodness,” and “spiritual goodness.” Or, similarly, Kent could juxtapose other advertising logos with verses from Scripture and quotes from Gertrude Stein and the poet e.e. cummings. Just a Wonder Bread wrapper could elicit reflections on hunger and poverty.

Kent eventually left the college and convent over differences with her bishop, who, in reaction to Vatican II reforms, made known his discontent over Kent’s preference to choose secular clothes over the habit. But as NPR recalls, Kent never left the church and continued producing art with overtly spiritual themes.

In her later years, Kent fought cancer several times, and the darkness of this struggle comes through in her later artwork. But, in 1985, she created her “Love” stamp for the U.S. Postal Service (which I still remember from my own childhood), 700 million copies of which were sold.

I am grateful to NPR for the introduction to Kent. In many ways what Kent did with art, I have sought to do in the writing of my first book Grace Sticks, as a bumper sticker-inspired meditation on The Way, The Truth and The Life. Kent’s relentless search for traces of God from among the often banal, mundane artifacts of American consumerism is a reminder that just about anyone can search for God and find God in the very ordinary circumstances of their life.