The image of California as the Golden State—a land of promise, risk, reinvention, and imagined abundance—has long shaped literary and cultural narratives of aspiration and freedom. Yet “golden states” are not bound to geography: they materialize wherever communities imagine possibility, long for deliverance, or chart pathways beyond constraint.  

This panel invites papers that explore the intersections of Christian thought, literary expression, and emancipatory narratives. Using “California, the Golden State” as a conceptual springboard rather than a geographical limit, essays on any region or national literature are welcome. How do authors construct narratives of freedom, belonging, and transcendence across diverse landscapes, traditions, and textual forms? How do literary (and other) texts use place to map or gesture towards spiritual longing, human flourishing, ecological justice, or theological understandings of liberation? 

Possible Areas of Inquiry: 

• Ecocriticism, place, and faith 

• Mapping, mobility, and pilgrimage 

• Emancipation narratives and the sacred 

• Reimagining “promised lands” 

• Prosperity narratives of extraction and abundance 

• Christian literary approaches to utopia, dystopia, and transformation 

• California as a tension-inflected site: poverty, paucity, promise, and prosperity 

• Embodied, communal, or indigenous experiences of liberation 

We welcome works that brings a variety of literary texts from a range of traditions, including non-U.S. texts or global Christianities, into conversation with the panel theme. We encourage scholars at all stages—including graduate students—to apply. 

Submission Guidelines 

Please submit a 250-300 word abstract and brief bio to ppowers@messiah.edu. 

Deadline: March 15