At the mention of the name, John the Baptizer, I immediately think of two churches that are thousands of miles apart. One is only eighty-five miles from my home, the Benedictine abbey church of St. John the Baptist on the campus of St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota. The other church is thousands of miles away, just outside of Florence, Italy, at the confluence of two superhighways. Each features visual images of John the Baptizer. The church in Italy pictures the life and death of John on great bronze "book pages" that line the walls of a corridor in that building. The other, in Minnesota, is striking, partly because sculpture of the Baptizer is done in black, so that John becomes a rather roughly-hewn, stark, and commanding figure, who stands at the side of the font in the at…