@johnehrett @Plough end\ What Ehrett defends at the level of political ethics—metaphysical ground held as a postulate, rather than actualized as a living claim—a cosmological Christianity embodies and enacts at the level of ontology: the dignity of the dependent as icon of what existence itself is.
Galway Kinnell wrote, "Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness." But sometimes it takes a hand on the brow, a re-naming, a re-touching—a country needs help to recognize itself, through repair, truth, and forms of life that make its goodness believable again.
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Saint Francis and the Sow By Galway Kinnell The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.