“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.