This Week In Eden

The Garden of Eden: A Dull Place? | Religion Dispatches

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:40:47 -0400

The Garden of Eden: A Dull Place? | Religion Dispatches:

My Q&A with Nathan Schneider on the Garden of Eden….

Florida Panhandle Garden of Eden, Dead on the Fourth of July

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 12:03:31 -0400

Florida Panhandle Garden of Eden, Dead on the Fourth of July:

This morning on Killing the Buddha, my tribute to Elvy Edison Callaway. He died 30 years ago today, but his highly idiosyncratic vision of the Garden of Eden in the Florida panhandle lives on…

Eden Mad Libs!

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 12:20:58 -0400

There’s no better way to convey the variety of interpretations of Gen. 2:10-14 than via the time-honored mad lib. In tribute to the form’s inventor, Leonard B. Stern, who died this week, a new version of the Bible’s geographical description of the Garden of Eden. Now I have to figure out how to get Gen. 2:10-14 included in this collection of other Bible Mad Libs.

A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four [plural noun]. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that [verb] [preposition] the [type of place] of Havilah, where there is [valuable substance]; and the [valuable substance] of that land is [adjective]; [natural resource] and [valuable substance] are there. The name of the second [body of water] is Gihon; it is the one that [verb] [preposition] the [type of place] of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which [verb] [preposition] of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

Life Goes On in the Garden of Eden

Tue, 31 May 2011 10:50:06 -0400

At the heart of Paradise Lust is a small town in southern Iraq, located at the former junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, called Qurna. They have a small park there which contains a tree supposed to be the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Usually Qurna stays out of the spotlight, but recently there’ve been some quiet, positive stories come out of this beautiful but much beleaguered place. Firstly, the Kuwait Times reports that river boats along the Shatt Al Arab which had once been used for smuggling were being reclaimed for a much more civilized purpose: floating cafes where Iraqis can unwind by smoking shisha and listening to music. And in other news, Austrian Airlines has announced that beginning June 8th, they will offer direct flights from Vienna to Baghdad, for the first time in 21 years. I’m hoping that by the time my book is published, people will be able to visit The Garden of Eden for themselves.

The Garden of Eden and a Sense of Place

Tue, 24 May 2011 15:12:42 -0400

The Garden of Eden and a Sense of Place:

The Common is a new literary journal celebrating “a modern sense of place,” and they published a chapter from Paradise Lust in their inaugural issue. Today on The Common blog, I give a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how I researched the Ohio chapter, and how the Garden of Eden is and is not about an earthly place.

What happens to Eden when the world ends?

Sat, 21 May 2011 10:00:06 -0400

Okay, so the beginning of the world—that’s the Garden of Eden, of course—might seem to have little to do with its end. Not so. In writing Paradise Lust, I became accidentally familiar with several other false prophecies of the end times, much like the one which, as you know unless you’ve been living under a rock, is occurring today. My favorite of these is of course, the Great Disappointment of 1844. Disappointing, because the world did NOT end. Nobody tells it better than Stephen Prothero, here. So many people believed Baptist end-times preacher William Miller, and so many people were ready to go, that when the prediction did not come true, practically a whole religious generation was thrown into a tizzy of doubt and unbelief, which ended up spawning several new religions, most notably, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were big on the end of the world; still are. When the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Ellen White, who claimed to be a prophet but was also/really an epileptic, began to show signs of fraudulence, a faction of early Jehovah’s Witnesses split off from the group, and eventually oversaw the writing of the Urantia Book, which has its own unique plan for the Garden of Eden, on a sunken island in the Mediterranean. You’ll have to buy the book to find out how that story goes. But meanwhile: be on the lookout for what happens after today, when, presumably, the world still exists. Let’s hope (pray?) that the “disappointment” of those believers who, NPR is fond of telling us, have no “plan B,” spawns some creative solutions, rather than desperation. Stay tuned…

Tse Tsan Tai’s 1914 map showing where everyone else...

Mon, 16 May 2011 14:44:59 -0400

Tse Tsan Tai’s 1914 map showing where everyone else thought the Garden of Eden was (see two black dots over the Middle East), vs. where he thought it was—see red circle over Outer Mongolia. Tse would have been 139 today.

Take Outer Mongolia...please!

Mon, 16 May 2011 11:05:00 -0400

Tse Tsan Tai would have been 139 today, had he not died long ago. Among the line-up of Eden-seekers I follow in Paradise Lust—preachers, archaeologists, hucksters—I confess he’s my favorite. Tse, a Hong Kong businessman and Chinese nationalist revolutionary, wrote a book in 1914 called The Location of the Garden of Eden and the Origin of the Chinese… in which he insisted, quite without the usual pseudo-scientific hemming and hawing, that the Garden of Eden, birthplace of mankind, must have been located in China, NOT Iraq. (“Why would the Lord Almighty have created man in such a place?”) I admire his brazenness, which makes that much more sense now that I realize he is a Taurus. But I also admire his motivations: it was tough to be both Christian and Chinese during World War I, and Tse was all about bringing his two identities together. He thought if he could prove that life began in China, all the nations of the world might unite in world peace. Can’t blame him for trying.

Happy Forbidden Fruit Day!

Fri, 13 May 2011 11:43:17 -0400

Good news! Today we celebrate the anniversary of the enlightenment of mankind! I always heard Friday the 13th was just a particular unlucky iteration of the number 13, which was unlucky because of the number of attendees at the Last Supper, etc, but it turns out there’s other intriguing mythology around the date. People who think about these things, of which there are many, have determined that Friday the 13th was the date that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit! Or maybe the day that God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden—which, if I think about it, must have been the same day after all. It’s not like God gave his only children “time out” to think about what they’d done before cursing them to live off the land forever. But wait—was it really a curse? If the forbidden fruit represents the entry into an independent, sexually awakened, and otherwise intelligent human life, then maybe it’s something to celebrate? I’m taking suggestions for how to commemorate Temptation and Expulsion….

Here’s the jacket again. Isn’t it pretty?

Mon, 09 May 2011 23:39:21 -0400

Here’s the jacket again. Isn’t it pretty?

Mormons Declare Eden Unimportant?

Mon, 09 May 2011 22:10:00 -0400

Four years ago May 7th, the offficial newsroom of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints made the following announcement:

“…Some doctrines are more important than others and might be considered core doctrines. For example, the precise location of the Garden of Eden is far less important than doctrine about Jesus Christ and His atoning sacrifice. The mistake that public commentators often make is taking an obscure teaching that is peripheral to the Church’s purpose and placing it at the very center.”

I see their point, and I confess that in my article on Huffington Post declaring the Mormon Eden “not the strangest out there,” I am guilty. But I have to say: the Mormon response to said defense of their Eden was very kind and positive.

Author Wade Graham on his book American Eden, about what our...

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 09:52:03 -0400

Author Wade Graham on his book American Eden, about what our gardens say about us. “Gardens are like dreams…most of what we do in our gardens is unconscious…they tell us about our aspirations…”

An old postcard depicting the Serpent Mound earthwork in Ohio,...

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:20:09 -0400

An old postcard depicting the Serpent Mound earthwork in Ohio, one of 14 proposed locations of the Garden of Eden explored in Paradise Lust. It is, after all, a large serpent… To learn the whole story, pick up a copy of the first issue of The Common, a new literary journal of writing about place.

Garden of Eden Reference Of The Week

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 23:43:08 -0400

Stephen Colbert: Mike Huckabee is closing in on Mitt Romney in the 2012 Republican race…”like a Tyrannosaurus bearing down on Adam and Eve.”

I've Been to the Mormon Garden of Eden

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 23:59:00 -0400

I've Been to the Mormon Garden of Eden:

Welcome, HuffPo readers. I’m happy to announce my inaugural piece for The Huffington Post, all about the Mormon Garden of Eden…which is in Jackson County, Missouri. Of course.

This picture was taken 33 years ago this month in the port of...

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:18:02 -0400

This picture was taken 33 years ago this month in the port of Djibouti, where Thor Heyerdahl, famous for crossing the Pacific in a balsa-wood raft in 1947, burned his latest watercraft in protest in 1978. The boat, the Tigris, was made of Mesopotamian marsh reeds woven together in bundles by an international crew of boatbuilders, and it had set sail from Qurna, Iraq, home of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, as proof positive that the ancient Sumerians could have traveled all the way from their marsh home, via the Persian Gulf, to the North Africa, all the way to Egypt. He didn’t make it—neither North nor South Yemen, which were busy fighting each other in a Cold War proxy battle, would allow him to travel through their ports, for security reasons. So Heyerdahl, stuck in Djibouti, torched his own ship in protest. It’s not paradise, but it is a Garden of Eden story: after all, God put angels with flaming swords at the gates to keep us from going back in.

30 Rock - Plan B - Video - NBC.com

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 16:58:14 -0400

30 Rock - Plan B - Video - NBC.com:

Garden of Eden Joke of the Week here: Tracy Jordan to Liz Lemon: “I’m doing God’s work in Africa; why just yesterday I kicked two naked people out of a Garden!”

Whatever Happened to Eden?

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 22:48:00 -0400

The Public Religion Research Institute conducted a new study one week after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, asking whether people believed that God was responsible for natural disasters like this. Interpretations of the study differ: the Huffington Post reassures: Most Americans Don’t Blame God For Natural Disasters. But the Christian Post takes another angle: Most Evangelicals Blame Disasters on End Times, Poll Finds.

This is not a new story. Many of the Eden-seekers I write about in Paradise Lust tried to reconcile their belief in a literal Eden with the unfolding revelations of modern science in the 19th and 20th centuries. Even those people who believe that the Garden of Eden did once exist in earthly form now agree: it’s gone. And many of them had theories about end of Eden that merge original sin and God’s wrath with natural disasters.

William F. Warren, who recently turned 178 years old, believed that the Garden of Eden did exist, at the North Pole, long long ago when, scientists of the time said, the Pole was much warmer. After human beings got too close to Godly knowledge, He flooded the Garden, sending Adam and Eve fleeing south behind a wave of water. (Much later, of course, the water froze.)

Tse Tsan Tai, a World War I-era Hong Kong entrepreneur, theorized that the earth had spasmed in a giant earthquake-like event, powerful enough to destroy his Outer Mongolian Eden, sink the lost continent of Atlantis, and bury the woolly mammoths.

Those who follow the 1940s sci-fi-flavored Bible alternative The Urantia Book believe that that Eden—an island near Crete—simply sunk slowly into the Mediterranean after man had left.

What’s new here is the causality: these Eden-seekers blamed God’s wrath on natural disasters, today’s evangelicals do the reverse.

A diagram of the many levels of heaven from Warren’s...

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:00:08 -0400

A diagram of the many levels of heaven from Warren’s immensely well-footnoted but totally implausible Paradise Found! The Cradle of Humanity at the North Pole

Happy Birthday, William F. Warren!

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 16:01:53 -0400

The first President of Boston University would be 178 years old today, March 13th. Apparently a much-loved lecturer in theology and respected administrator, he also spent twenty years trying to convince the world that the Garden of Eden—the origin of human life—was at the North Pole. Yeah. He wrote a hugely complicated book about it. To be fair, nobody had actually been to the actual North Pole yet. And Warren wasn’t arguing that his tropical paradise, with giant sequoias, mammoths, northern lights, and “hyperborean Eocene man”—Adam and Eve—was still there. It had obviously been destroyed and frozen over after the great flood. But still.