Life and Loss in the Natural History Museum

This essay, which appears in Comment, takes its impetus from Reframing Dioramas: The Art of Preserving Wilderness at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, which celebrates the reopening of the museum’s long-closed diorama hall. The exhibition showcases century-old displays alongside three newly commissioned artist installations, an occasion that compelled me to reimagine the natural history diorama as a visual parable of lost paradise, through which the viewer simultaneously confronts the primordial harmony of Eden, the estrangement of exile, and the eschatological hope of restoration.

The diorama presents nature in exile. Preserved in form yet emptied of breath, the wild animals mirror humanity’s own condition after Eden, separated from the source of life and far from home. For the viewer, the glass barrier, like the cherub’s flaming sword, guards a paradise we can no longer enter.

In our culture of spectacle, we do more than consume illusions. We hide inside them. Simulation offers refuge from the reality we no longer wish to face: dying ecosystems, fractured communities, and the ache of spiritual disconnection. The natural history diorama makes this denial visible. Its frozen animals and idealized landscapes are not neutral displays. They are monuments to loss, even if they refuse to grieve. As they present the appearance of life they simultaneously testify to its absence.

The diorama therefore makes visible a deeper spiritual crisis: when representation replaces relationship, the world becomes an object and we become spectators, losing the capacity for encounter. This is the logic of the false self, constructed through images and consumption, cut off from the divine breath that sustains being. The diorama is a mirror and mourning of this loss. Yet it also gestures toward the hope promised in Revelation through its dramatic vision. A vision that can awaken our longing for what is absent, lead us to reconcile our relationships to all living things and move toward a theological ecology rooted in God’s living presence.

Lion diorama at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County