Brother Dave sent us this speech by Bill Moyers. In his speech, Mr. Moyers more cogently covers much of the territory I have been pondering. He also has a better sense of history than I. I strongly recommend you take the 15-20 min to read the speech. And see if you can spot the same slight historical inaccuracy I did (I suspect it was a typo, since Bill M. would have known the date intimately).

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The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.
G.K. Chesterton, essayist and novelist (1874-1936) via Word a Day

Chesterton is another one of my heroes. I recommend any of his Fr Brown mysteries – some of which are so aesthetic, they could have been written by Oscar Wilde. Chesterton wrote a very fine book on St. Francis, which reclaims Francis from romantic watercolors.

Although I don't have the citation in front of me, I have it on good authority that Chesterton (not Joseph Campbell) said that angels could fly because they took themselves lightly.