Non-Californians rarely refer to the Golden State as a sacred place or religious landscape. Yet, California fascinates, in part, due to its religious extravagance–think Jim Jones, Heavens Gate, the Crystal Cathedral, Harold Camping’s predicted end of the world, the Grateful Dead. Everything is here, and then some. This essay looks at California as an epicenter of religious expression and a global microcosm for hybrid religions, new religions, and experimental religious practices. The essay analyzes migration, the California/Mexico border, genders/sexualities, race/ethnicity, commercialization, embodiment/disembodiment, and the natural world as lenses on California’s religious landscape.

Moving back and forth from Los Angeles to San Francisco, this essay travels back in time to an imported experience of African American culture that came to the West Coast. Part of a familial culture, which converged with this place amidst the streets, and trees, and family heirlooms, this essay explores what it is about California that makes it a place of such incredible placemaking. Journeying through George’s own California and how to understand this place amidst the interruptions and ways of being here, the essay concludes acknowledging California’s existence between myth and reality, wherein passes California.

This essay examines the history of futurism and the appeal and difficulty of predicting the future. It considers the difference between the Cold War-era futurism of making predictions and the more contemporary style of shaping and building the future piece by piece.

This paper draws on extended fieldwork in San Diego County to show that suburban residents exhibit a particular set of rights-claims that they make specifically around their residence in their suburban community. These claims are largely made legitimate by homeownership and are based around maintenance of a perceived ideal lifestyle. In addition, I discuss the duties that suburban citizens feel bound to uphold. Residents of the community feel it is their duty to respect the perceived rights of others to maintain a safe, clean, and healthy community. A major focus of this suburban citizenship is an attempt to keep perceived threats away from the community. I illustrate that a suburban form of citizenship springs from a tension and uneasy synthesis between two competing conceptions of citizenship—one based on individual rights-claims and the other based on community membership and involvement.

This essay documents and examines the remains of military bunkers along the California coast. These structures, monuments to the grim anticipation of war, appear to be intrusions upon the beauty of the landscape, but we might also view them as witnesses to the nation’s particular imagination of danger during the 20th Century, and more specifically, to California’s ever deepening relationship with the defense industry.