When John Muir, a wilderness mystic and founder of the Sierra Club, wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” he was reflecting on his profound relationship with California’s pristine alpine wilderness. But Erik Davis posits something further. In his kaleidoscopic history of spiritual California, The Visionary State, Davis proposes that Muir was also making room for an innovative, new “rootless tradition.” California dreaming, it seems, has it own dream logic.

It seems that every six months or so a flutter of press activity erupts over Christian Yoga. Typically, the press reduces this complex and juicy issue into two opposing sides. In one corner we usually meet one of a growing handful of Christian yoga “innovators”, who have stripped yoga of its popular Hindu roots and iconography and grafted Christian elements therein. In the other corner, we typically meet Subhas Tiwari, professor of yoga philosophy and meditation at the Hindu University of America in Florida, whose famous line is “Yoga is Hinduism.” He stresses how you can't separate yoga from Hinduism because they are one and the same.