A modern sacred artist’s take on Church’s ancient prayer

Number 10 on the list highlights the publisher’s new “Second Edition” translation. The list is followed by a Liturgy of the Hours (LOTH) explanatory video from Ascension Presents, with Father Mike Schmitz, who admits it is his “favorite way to pray,” even though it was the most intimidating commitment of his priestly ordination. 

An Aleteia article from October 2025 reports on the new translation, similar to the 2011 Roman Missal that had been re-translated from the original Latin into English. Ascension Press and Word on Fire were chosen by the U.S. Catholic bishops as the two exclusive publishers for this second edition of the Liturgy of the Hours four-volume set for use in the United States. This USCCB page provides an overview of the extensive process for the new translation (which started years ago, in November 2012).

The Word on Fire version is inviting donations to provide a copy of their LOTH publication to every seminarian in the United States. Meanwhile, Ascension Press has been offering instruction on this most ancient prayer of the Church and featuring the behind-the-scenes process of production while introducing the sacred artist they partnered with. A fundraiser to help priests and nuns get the new translation is also available (see below).

Among these resources provided by Ascension are:

Ruth Stricklin — an Alaskan native living in Phoenix — was contacted by Ascension Press and invited to submit samples for an unrevealed project in early 2025. After six months, she’d almost forgotten about it, when suddenly the publisher contacted her, saying she’d been chosen from among the pool of potentials. 

Jonathan Strate, Ascension President and CEO, told Aleteia about Stricklin’s selection: 

The large-scale mural artist “was floored” because she’s not a graphic designer. The closest thing to Ascension’s LOTH artwork concept that Stricklin had undertaken were covers for Source & Summit’s annual missal. 

A self-taught artist and convert to Catholicism, Stricklin formed New Jerusalem Studios in 2014 with her husband Geoff (a graduate of Mundelein Seminary’s Liturgical Institute and high school theology teacher). The studio developed, as their website states, in response “to a growing commitment to authentic liturgical renewal … especially seen in the desire of many parishes to bring a traditional sense of beauty back into their sacred spaces.”

After Stricklin had been commissioned to paint a 25-foot triptych-style liturgical mural in the gymnasium at Xavier College Preparatory, the all-girls schools in Phoenix where she was teaching theatre, other local commissions from the metropolis’ tight-knit Catholic community kept coming in. Today her work, which includes mural painting and renovation consulting, can be found at multiple sites in Phoenix and the state of Arizona as well as Texas, Missouri, and Illinois. This spring, three of her pieces were selected for the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See at the Vatican. 

Reflecting on her personal experience with the LOTH project, Stricklin told Aleteia that she feels her heart is “so full” she “can’t even fully process it,” even after many months of dedicated effort. “Every so often I stop and am just blown away; it’s very surreal.” 

Stricklin shared that, as has been God’s pattern in her life, he “brings something to me and encourages me to say yes and trust.” She says she feels incredibly honored to have been sought out and then chosen for “such a historic project … one that will affect generations.” When the last Liturgy of the Hours was printed in 1975, Stricklin was a one-year-old living in Alaska.  

Stricklin told us about her experience of beauty as a child. She recalled seeing the Alaska Range of mountains out the bedroom window of her childhood home in North Pole (a town southeast of Fairbanks with a population still hovering around 3,000). Describing the region as rugged, unforgiving, and dangerous, she said, “Everyday life is about survival, but I was surrounded by so much natural beauty.” 

Strate’s reflection about Stricklin’s art being connected to Joseph Ratzinger’s vision is particularly significant given that the artist’s own attachment to and longing for beauty, steeped in her nature-rooted childhood, is something she describes just as the late pontiff did. 

“Seeing beauty on such a scale that it wounded you” -- a phrase Ratzinger used in an August 2002 homily. “My earliest memories go back to the beauty of nature, and that was my first real understanding of the love of God ...” 

Stricklin remembers the specific place where, at 10 years old, she first sensed this. “We were driving through the rugged wilderness, and the mountains were all around us. I was looking out a window, and I felt just an ache.” With vocal inflection to emphasize what she meant, Stricklin let the word “ache” hang and linger. 

“It was so beautiful it hurt to look at it, knowing I couldn’t keep it. It was just there to show me God’s love, but I couldn’t grasp it or hang on to it … It was fleeting and I knew it.”

Likening the moment to the Apostles’ reaction to the Transfiguration, Stricklin added, “I knew I couldn’t stay there forever… but God’s message to me was, ‘No, I’m showing you my heart for you…’”

She shared other early memories, for example of waiting for the school bus outside in the dark. “The Northern Lights would be overhead swirling. I would just wonder at how things like this could be possible and think God must love me so much to give me this kind of beauty that brings such joy.” Stricklin paused and the lilting cadence of her voice showed her struggle to find the words to express, even as an adult, “the mind that must have been behind this beauty.”

Her grappling with this concept of the “wound of beauty” has led her to the only satisfying answer — that it’s our longing for God, the desire to eventually be with him. “Beauty gives us a glimpse of him, but we can’t live there in this life … We have to go on with our lives” and allow that “wound” to remind us that we can only fully possess Beauty himself after this life. Even so, she clarified that this wound “gives us joy” because by it “we recognize God; we recognize truth.”

Raised in the Nazarene Church, a religion that focuses on the spiritual rather than physical representation of Jesus Christ and thus avoids religious imagery, Stricklin commented that she didn’t get a sense of beauty from church. “I was learning about God, about Scripture and being taught that God loves us, but when I was in nature I could just sense” the reality that there was something more. 

When she providentially took the job at Xavier Prep, Stricklin was immediately impacted by the chaplain’s passion and fervor. In her Protestant upbringing, she had encountered spiritual passion as a frenzied and emotional worship, but the priest’s reverence and sobriety deeply affected her.  

She called Father John Muir, now Vicar General and Moderator of the Curia for the Phoenix Diocese, a “good” and “sneaky teacher.” As he shared his ideas for the gymnasium mural he began introducing her to the rich and ancient artistic tradition of Catholicism, both the Eastern and Western traditions. He encouraged her to meditate on Scripture, learn about the Mass and read the catechism, eventually inviting her to full communion with the Church. (Stricklin became Catholic in October 2010 with Xavier’s principal Sr. Joan Fitzgerald, BVM, as her sponsor.)

The turning point for her — in the process of creating the “River of Life” mural depicting John’s vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem recorded in Revelation — was a moment where she recognized what the Eucharist was. “I just became so hungry for it that I realized, whatever else I have to sort out about the theology of the Catholic faith I will, because I have to receive this because this is God,” Stricklin confessed. 

“I just really understand in my bones how beauty and sacred art evangelize because that’s basically what my story is,” she shared. And this “following God’s lead every day” that brought her to Catholicism would also lead to Stricklin’s vocation as a sacred artist, and even her vocation to marriage. 

Studying for another commissioned project, Stricklin spent three weeks at the Liturgical Institute outside of Chicago. It was a short period of time but it coincided with the very end of Geoff’s five years earning a master’s degree there. After being introduced on campus, the couple continued to correspond and eventually married in 2014. 

Stricklin assessed God’s providence as “extraordinary.” Geoff’s graduate studies of the LOTH proved instrumental to the Ascension commission. She said it is incredible for her to see how various elements in life are brought together by God “at just the perfect time.” 

Stricklin applauded Ascension’s leadership for “going out on a limb, taking a risk to hire a living artist.” As the first LOTH to include artwork, Stricklin feels it was a “beautifully inspired move” as it fosters a renewal of sacred art culture. 

View some of the actual artwork HERE. 

They are following in the footsteps of the Church, a patron of the arts for centuries, Stricklin said. This “is why we have Caravaggio and Michelangelo … Not that I’m those people,” she chuckled. But she spoke of how the Ascension project encourages “a flourishing and resurgence of beauty,” necessary because “the culture has been starved of beauty so long … giving us in its place images that are degrading the human person and not offering hope.”

Valuing the publisher’s efforts to make the LOTH accessible to lay people, Stricklin expressed, “I love where their heart is and I pray that this really leads to a new surge of lay people learning how to get into this daily prayer” and tap into the power of praying “with the Church … It’s like a stream that is flowing, bringing life, and you’re invited to jump in and participate, or not.”

“This is what the Church has given us and it is so incomprehensibly beautiful that when people get a hold of it, they become almost addicted because it is really literally God’s work — begun at Creation, going out and radiating as the vehicle for his action … It’s his work. He is the one who instigated this and he’s calling us to participate. And as we pray together as a Church we’re helping literally to redeem the world, to sanctify it through our prayer.”