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Snake Church, Sue Hall Pyke
Snake Church, Sue Hall Pyke
Animal Studies Journal
This paper imagines Snake Church as a post-secular worship practice that reaches with and beyond the vilified serpent held within the limits of Judeo-Christianity. Snake Church offers a devotional practice enlivening enough to shift the languish of a post-secular world where the reasonableness of Enlightenment has crumbled into numbers like 440ppms and 1.5C. The Western empire has been revealed as stark naked, vulnerable, an old skin that cannot hold my world. Snake Church offers me a sacred opiating hope. As I approach a nascent liturgy, here, in the settler-ravaged Stony Rises, home to the Eastern Maar tiger snake and Eastern …
A Comparative History Of Resurrection Plants, John Charles Ryan
A Comparative History Of Resurrection Plants, John Charles Ryan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "A Comparative Literary History of Resurrection Plants" John Charles Ryan assembles a comparative history of resurrection plants through textual analysis of early botanical commentaries, herbal references, prose, poetry, and other sources. Resurrection plants include a diverse range of botanical species, typically of arid regions, that appear to come back to life after complete desiccation. Historical and contemporary observers—from sixteenth-century herbalist John Gerard to contemporary Australian poet John Kinsella—have expressed an abiding fascination for resurrection plants' capacity to survive harsh environmental conditions. The plants court their own deaths by paring down—then restoring—physiological processes in relation to shifting ecological …