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.

Intro -- Contents -- List of Figures -- 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.