We are pleased to feature this guest post from Mark David Dietz. Mark has been a company commander in the US Army’s 101st Airborne, a corporate training manager and management consultant, a teacher of ethics at the University of Texas at Austin, and he is now the Vice President of research and development at a small company. He is the author of An Awkward Echo: Matthew Arnold and John Dewey (IAP, 2010).

by Mark David Dietz

‘Twere well could you permit the world to live
As the world pleases: what’s the world to you?
Much. I was born of woman, and drew milk
As sweet as charity from human breasts.
I think, articulate, I laugh and weep,
And exercise all functions of a man.
How then should I and any man that lives
Be strangers to each other?
– William Cowper, The Task, Book III, The Garden (1785)

I am nominally an atheist. That alone should preclude me from religious apologetics, and yet religion is dear to my heart. It is a garden richly sown, flowered with the gifts of nature and artifice, arbored by stout-grown trees of tradition and reason, lawned with the turf of the daily domestic struggle, and watered with the tears of human desire. It is, though rather should not be, a walled garden of paternalism and security; the walls keep at bay the strife of anarchy, but they are old, mossy, crumbling, walls, and they exclude too much of life and nature. I would I were not a stranger in this garden. And yet and still – I am nominally an atheist. [Read more…]