For her recent project, Jumana Manna researched the Post Herbarium at the American University of Beirut, which archives the biodiversity of Syria, Palestine and Sinai, and was established by the American missionary, botanist and surgeon George E. Post (1838–1909) in the late 19th century. Post, along with scores of European and American scholars and scientists travelled to the Levant with the belief that scientific study of the so-called Bible Land would unlock Christian theology. Bible Dictionaries were quite popular at that time. Some of the specimen in the collection are extinct today due to climate change, real estate development and war, making the herbarium a cemetery of dead and living eco-systems of Lebanon and the region. Manna’s presentation will reflect on the research, and tease out the historical and contemporary repercussions of a gaze lodged between religious imagination and the seemingly rational endeavor of botany.