Front Porch: Summer 2000

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Front Porch: Summer 2000

by Harry L. Watson
Southern Cultures, Vol. 6, No. 2: Summer 2000

"God is coming back, and man is she pissed."

“Prepare to Meet God.” The stark, prophetic warning once glared out from thousands of roadside tree trunks in the twentieth-century South, just as it does from Charlie Curtis’s arresting picture in this issue’s photo essay “Signs of the South.” Sometimes the message was even more unsparingly personal: “Prepare to Meet Thy God.” Whether blazoned on a high-priced billboard or traced in fading letters on a hand-made cross, the summons was once inescapable on the southern landscape, evangelism’s inventive response to the culture of the automobile.

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