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.

The Canadian Edmonton Journal reports upon the return of Calgary priest, Father Emanuel Buttigieg, from the world’s only formal school for exorcists. Buttigieg was one of 120 priests attending the four month-long course “Exorcism and the Prayer of Liberation” held at the Vatican.