Earthquakes and Gardens
Saint Hilarion’s Cyprus
9780226824567
9780226823225
9780226824550
Earthquakes and Gardens
Saint Hilarion’s Cyprus
Essays about ruination, resilience, reading, and religion generated by a reflection on a fourth-century hagiography.
In Jerome’s Life of Saint Hilarion, a fourth-century saint briefly encounters the ruins of an earthquake-toppled city and a haunted garden in Cyprus. From these two fragmentary passages, Virginia Burrus delivers a series of sweeping meditations on our experience of place and the more-than-human worlds—the earth and its gods—that surround us. Moving between the personal and geological, Earthquakes and Gardens ruminates on destruction and resilience, ruination and resurgence, grief and consolation in times of disaster and loss. Ultimately, Burrus’s close readings reimagine religion as a practice that unsettles certainty and develops mutual flourishing.
In Jerome’s Life of Saint Hilarion, a fourth-century saint briefly encounters the ruins of an earthquake-toppled city and a haunted garden in Cyprus. From these two fragmentary passages, Virginia Burrus delivers a series of sweeping meditations on our experience of place and the more-than-human worlds—the earth and its gods—that surround us. Moving between the personal and geological, Earthquakes and Gardens ruminates on destruction and resilience, ruination and resurgence, grief and consolation in times of disaster and loss. Ultimately, Burrus’s close readings reimagine religion as a practice that unsettles certainty and develops mutual flourishing.
192 pages | 35 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2023
Class 200: New Studies in Religion
History: Ancient and Classical History
Religion: Christianity, Philosophy of Religion, Theology, and Ethics
Reviews
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Part One: Points of Departure
Memories
Three Notes on Method
Setting Out, with Jerome
Part Two: Paphos
Poetry and Place
Curating Earthquakes
Life in Ruins
Part Three: The Mountain
Geographies of the Remote
Entropic Gardens
Literary Cartographies
Part Four: Coda
An Ocean of Possibility
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Part One: Points of Departure
Memories
Three Notes on Method
Setting Out, with Jerome
Part Two: Paphos
Poetry and Place
Curating Earthquakes
Life in Ruins
Part Three: The Mountain
Geographies of the Remote
Entropic Gardens
Literary Cartographies
Part Four: Coda
An Ocean of Possibility
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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