Earthquakes and Gardens

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