Richard Pope

Suggesting that the replacement of an animistic worldview with a mechanistic one has led humans to deny their animality, Flight from Grace calls on readers to appreciate how our past relationship with birds might help transform our current relationship with nature.

A Cultural History of Humans and Birds

Flight from Grace

Human animals are despoiling nature and causing a sixth extinction on Earth. Our natural environment is being compromised, and birds and other animals are disappearing at an alarming rate. Flight from Grace does not so much reveal the extent of the damage as ask and answer the perplexing question: why? This book traces human reverence for birds from the Stone Age and the New Stone Age, through the cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Peru, and Greece and through biblical traditions, up to its vestiges in the present. Richard Pope takes a hard look at Judaeo-Christian and ancient Greek thought to demonstrate how the emergence of anthropocentrism and belittling of nature led to our present-day ecological dilemma. Striking images of cultural artifacts -- many little-known -- together with extensive discussion of art, music, literature, and religion illustrate the paradox in our contemporary relationship to the natural world. Humanity, in moving from its paleolithic origins to modern times, has simultaneously distanced itself from and disenchanted nature. Suggesting that the replacement of an animistic worldview with a mechanistic one has led humans to deny their animality, Flight from Grace calls on readers to appreciate how our past relationship with birds might help transform our current relationship with nature.

Daniel Armstrong

Cornelis H. van Schooneveld

In the Edition of Nikolaas Van Wijk

The Old Church Slavonic Translation of the Andron Hagion Biblos

Me n Len is a warm and humourously nostalgic look back at life int he backwoods of Ontario in the "good old days." The setting is the rural area of eastern Haliburton, Ontario, in the decades before the chainsaw and the outboard motor became the commons ounds in this beautiful region of central Canada. The main character is a grizzled and lovable 82-year-old trapper and woodsman named Len who takes the reader through the adventures in his memory to meet the people of his past. The stories he tells and the way he tells them are often funny, sometimes poignant, but always filled with an unforgettable down-to-earth philosophy.

Richard Pope

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