"Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear, Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life."

--Hannah Coulter in Hannah Coulter

Who said death has no implications for political life? Not Wendell Berry. Berry points us to the truth that death, insofar as it serves as a frame for life and leads to an afterlife that is truer than this life, is foundational for an understanding of politics. Granted that death has implications for political life today, what would the absence of death have implied for the pre-fall world? How did social/political relationships differ in pre-lapsarian Eden?