In the catalog of civic blessings—good schools, safe streets, sturdy institutions—there is another, less heralded, but no less important: dogs. They civilize us by their presence, instruct us by their example, and forgive us in ways no political institution ever could.

Last weekend, Roger Sherman Baldwin Park became a pageant ground for this truth. Puttin’ on the Dog, the annual festival of adoption and rescue, drew hundreds of Greenwich residents and their four-legged companions into a kind of civic liturgy. It was not merely an afternoon of entertainment but an affirmation that this town remains tethered to something enduring: the joy of companionship and the duty of stewardship.

That duty is observed in sacred spaces as well.

Every autumn, churches across Greenwich open their lawns a

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