Last December, in a crystalline “polar vortex,” my husband and I drove to Florida after getting married in Ohio. As we drove along Interstate 75, we remarked on an increasingly common observation: Each town along the highway seemed interchangeable with the last. Starbucks, McDonald’s, Subway, sometimes a Walmart—and then the same businesses repeated one town later. And even those businesses themselves had been stripped of any individuality or quirk. No campy Ronald McDonald statue waving maniacally. No bright red Pizza Huts, the kind that have become internet shorthand for a kitschier, more whimsical version of America. Just sleek box stores in drab “millennial gray.”
Six months later, my husband and I found ourselves in Florida again, this time flying into Fort Myers from LaGuardia and driving the hour southeast to Ave Maria for the 45th annual Chesterton Conference hosted by the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. The destination itself could not have been more distinctive: a town of local businesses organized with great intentionality around a magnificent Catholic church. But the drive to get there felt familiar. As our Uber drove past swamplands being aggressively developed by heavy machinery, beneath a sky eerily pregnant with the lightning of a passing summer storm, we saw more of the same: Dunkin Donuts, Orangetheory Fitness, Tropical Smoothie Cafe. Businesses stripped of any kookiness, given generic corporate names by external marketing consultants. Aside from the palm trees, we may as well have been on Long Island, where we had come from, or in Columbus, Ohio, where I had grown up.
Dale Ahlquist, who heads the conference every year, is, of course, an unmatched, once-in-a-lifetime talent. In his opening address, he introduced the conference’s theme: sanity, as drawn from Chesterton’s 1926 economics book, The Outline of Sanity. For Chesterton—as Ahlquist explained with his characteristic brilliance and comedic timing (no small part of why fans return to these conferences yearly)—sanity is not merely the absence of mental illness but the presence of common sense: the ability to see reality as it is. Marked by four qualities, it includes balance and humility (seeing oneself in proportion to the universe), freedom (liberty ordered by natural law), and happiness (the mirth of a creature delighting in his Creator).
Sanity is not merely the absence of mental illness but the presence of common sense: the ability to see reality as it is.
Chesterton—known to many as “the apostle of common sense”—returned to the theme of sanity often throughout his work. As Ahlquist explained, it is one of his great recurring threads. In The Outline of Sanity, however, he looks at sanity with respect to social reform. He argues repeatedly throughout his work that every modern philosophy that departs from Christianity, taken to its natural conclusion, becomes insane. It will lead not only to madness but to self-destruction—to suicide. Applied to individuals, this is tragic; applied to a society, it’s catastrophic. “A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit,” Chesterton writes. (Trump ballroom, anyone?) “But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane.”
And as a state, Ahlquist explained, a century after Chesterton visited our land (during Prohibition, sipping bootleg ales with priests at Notre Dame), we cannot seem to escape a wild set of “-isms.” Ultimately, while each may have attractions at first, they become joyless and suicidal: atheism, materialism, Marxism, Darwinism. Especially feminism, Ahlquist argued. Not only does feminism pit the sexes against each other, violating the beautiful complementarity God intended, but also, it is a myopic framework that precludes motherhood altogether as a category of meaning. It is uncreative in the most literal sense. Its logical conclusion: the profound evil of abortion, the slaying of the most innocent human life.
As far as “-isms” go, socialism and capitalism, the book’s principal subjects, also warrant commentary, Ahlquist explained. They pertain to how a society operates economically—how workers get paid and families buy food—and thus to dignity. Two sides of the same coin, both idolize money, ultimately reflecting materialism. One advocated by a Scottish Calvinist, the other by a German atheist, both also fundamentally clash with Roman Catholicism. In response, Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum, insisting that the economy exists to serve the human person—not the other way around. Now we have Pope Leo XIV, the world’s first American pope, who has explicitly invoked his predecessor, arguing that, as in the industrial revolution, the Church has much to say about markets, work, and the human person. There is something fitting about this unfolding as America celebrates her 250th birthday. For all our national imperfections, it’s uplifting that an American pope is inviting the world to consider the dignity that labor deserves.
On this 250th anniversary of America, Ahlquist exhorted, let’s celebrate an economic framework that reflects this sanity: localism. Unlike socialism and capitalism, Chesterton’s sanest economy is not rooted in power but in place. Goodbye to Arby’s and First Watch. Hello to Snook Inn (a favorite local bar outside of Fort Myers). To the old-world Italian pork store in New Jersey. To the Texas saloon that could exist nowhere else. To the Maryland crab shack with Christmas lights still hanging in July. To the roadside Indiana farmstand selling corn in the blazing August sun. To businesses with charming imperfections bearing unmistakable imprints of the communities that produced them rather than of management consultants. If the modern world has given us monoculture, Chesterton’s answer is glorious particularity: Make America weird again.
What does that sanity look like in practice? The first talk the next morning sought wisdom from our neighbors up north, of all places. David Beresford, a college professor and Gilbert columnist, delivered a lecture about lessons in sanity from his homeland, Canada. I’ll admit that when I first saw those two topics—Canada and sanity—paired together at a Chesterton conference and filtered through the lens of social reform, I assumed Beresford’s talk would be a cautionary tale—a “what not to do.” In short, I assumed it would be about euthanasia. Canada is, after all, the euthanasia capital of the world. Instead, I was surprised that assisted suicide was not mentioned. Instead, Beresford, a father of seven—with the most humble, understated wit—focused on homesteading, on raising more kids than you can afford, and on the delightful impracticalities of purchasing a farmhouse and pursuing a PhD to study insects, of all things, at the age of thirty-seven, with nine mouths to feed. It was a delightful flouting of pragmatism—a delicious trolling of the type of dowdy mindset that would point out the various inconveniences and fret about 401(k)s.
The next talk, from Fr. Michael Rennier, was also about having more kids than you can afford—about the multiplication paradox that the womb can contain: A new child seems like he or she will introduce burdens and limits on a family, yet somehow the child ultimately seems to multiply what the family can actually create, achieve, and do (not to mention how much it can love). Rennier—a Catholic priest, Anglican convert, and father of six—spoke from experience, explaining that more than multiplying a family’s capacities, children also enlarge the sacramental imagination, teaching us to encounter reality not as something to be controlled or optimized but as a gift to be received.
In that enlargement of the sacramental imagination, perhaps a child is also like a novel. The next talk after Rennier’s was about a “novel education”—about the opportunity to self-educate through great literature. Listening to Mark Johnson, it struck me that there are profound connections between a novel and a child. Both are acts of creation rather than manufacture: begotten, not produced. Both take on lives of their own, sometimes delightfully different from what the author (or parents) first imagined. Both are irreducibly particular. Both are expressions of fruitfulness and of hope (indeed, a civilization that ceases to produce children will cease to produce great stories, replacing both with entertainment and consumption). Finally, like a child, a novel cannot be standardized. Johnson’s larger point was that great novels resist the reduction of education to systemization. Against the educational philosophies of, say, John Dewey, they return us to first things—to philosophy, virtue, and the questions that make us human.
To connect this back to Rennier, perhaps a novel is also like a child with respect to the multiplication paradox. A novel, like a child, appears at first to contradict efficiency. A novel, after all, seems the least straightforward way to learn philosophy or history when one could simply consult the primary sources directly. Yet the detour proves the shortest distance after all. Just as children enlarge a family’s capacities, great novels enlarge readers’ minds. Like the child, the novel does not merely convey information; it multiplies how much the reader can actually absorb.
Of course, when it comes to safeguarding the most sacred stories, the Blessed Mother is the exemplar. The ark of the covenant, she gives birth to the greatest story ever told: to the Logos, the Word incarnate. As Johnson quoted in his talk, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” Thus, if Christ is the Word incarnate, then Christianity already unites the concepts of word and child in profound ways. In creating or enjoying stories, songs, novels, plays, and poems—quintessentially Chestertonian pursuits—we participate, however imperfectly, both in God’s creative power and in Mary’s stewardship of the Word.
But then, the next question becomes: How do we educate our impractical hordes of children in ways that reflect all of this? A talk later that afternoon titled “The Glory of Dirt” from Dan Kerr of St. Martin’s Academy offered insights. Kerr’s talk was ostensibly about soil, but also about education. In fact, he described his address on “soil and sanity” as a “reformed gardener’s guide to education.” His central metaphor was that education is more like gardening than manufacturing. And he spoke of monoculture—not only in farming (the soil in which plants grow) but in childrearing (the cultural soil in which children develop). Good gardeners tend the soil, keeping it rich and diverse. They weed patiently. They harden seedlings gradually against the elements. They do not rush fruit before its season. Above all, they cultivate conditions under which living things can flourish. So too with education. It must honor human particularity and prepare children for worship, wisdom, and virtue.
Kerr’s reference to monoculture also brought the conference full circle. In terms of businesses and neighborhoods, we are living in a monoculture of Chipotle and Panera, where Columbus feels like Fort Myers feels like Garden City. Our towns increasingly share the same storefronts and even the same service experiences, which are increasingly standardized, shaped less by personality than by corporate procedure. We have lost the cultural equivalent of soil biodiversity. The result is not merely visual and experiential monotony but a homogenization of the environments in which human beings are formed. Thus, localism is needed more than ever. The problem of monoculture is rooted, so to speak, in the soil. Recover it, and the rest may follow.
Nor was Kerr alone in pointing to the land. Beresford’s reflections on Canadian homesteading, Tim Streiff’s meditations on Adam and Eve tilling the earth, and recurring farming references throughout the conference all suggested similar conclusions. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Ahlquist himself will keynote the Catholic Land Movement’s conference in August. For Chestertonians, homesteading is not simply about growing carrots, raising chickens, or posting sourdough photos on Instagram. It’s an attempt to recover sane soil—for families, children, neighborhoods, and souls. Whether shielding ourselves from the impurities of industrial food, resisting corporate monoculture, protecting education from efficiency logic, nurturing our sacramental imaginations, or recovering our vocations as cultivators, the land provides a school of sanity.
Of course, if homesteading is to be sustainable for those who pursue it, it must also shape how we spend our money. At the annual Troubadours panel, the inimitable Joseph Pearce made a renewed pitch for Chestertonians to shop local. Never buy Budweiser, he said. Support local brewers instead. Buy produce and meat from farmers’ markets and local butchers. Every dollar spent is a vote, he reminded attendees. The sentiment had come up earlier that evening over dinner, as I sat next to Beresford. Support local, he had said—but this cannot be a top-down project of central planning. It must begin in families. It must be grassroots.
We must continue to wonder, to wander, and to resist the cult of efficiency. We must recover common sense while defying the reduction of truth into mere pragmatism.
And the principle of buying local applies just as readily to schools. Pearce argued that parents should invest in grassroots educational institutions—Catholic schools, hybrid academies, homeschooling cooperatives—rather than surrendering their children to increasingly centralized public systems. Just as dollars are votes, so too are enrollment decisions. The culture of death will destroy itself, Pearce reminded attendees; it is suicidal. We don’t have to waste time worrying about its demise. Instead, we must focus on building something to “fill the breach” for when the authoritarians dig their own graves.
That’s where the Chesterton schools come into play. Americans are lucky to have school choice, recently upheld by high-profile Supreme Court decisions, as Pearce and University of Dallas professor Susan Hanssen both reminded attendees. Later, the remarkably talented Emily de Rotstein shared how the Chesterton Schools Network has grown from a single parent-led academy into an international network of more than 100 schools, providing affordable, rigorous classical education. That extraordinary growth was recently recognized with the 2025 Yass Prize, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for educational innovation.
Million-dollar prizes aside, underlying much of the conference chatter was a deeper unease—fitting, perhaps, because of The Outline of Sanity’s subject matter—about economics. This was a repeated theme and, it seems fair to say, an area of mild anxiety for attendees (“mild” because anxiety never actually trumps joy for a Chestertonian, who has “tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head”). We are now in the waning of the ’90s-era Reagan—John Paul II alliance during which many Catholics made peace with capitalism (or in many cases, celebrated it enthusiastically) insofar as it countered communism. They understood the inhumanity of the Soviet experiment, saw how Reagan and John Paul II had aligned to defeat it, and consequently viewed capitalism in a perhaps more flattering light than it might otherwise have enjoyed. (Ave Maria University itself, with its beautiful homages to John Paul II and Mother Teresa scattered throughout the campus, reflects that moment strikingly, and Tom Monaghan is, in many ways, a defining and admirable avatar of its finest impulses.) But that consensus is now fading. Increasingly, capitalism itself is viewed with suspicion—not only by lefties but by many conservatives as well. The Reagan—John Paul II era has given way to a renewed interest in older traditions of Catholic social teaching, especially the thought of Leo XIII and distributism.
Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, for example, surfaced in at least three talks, certainly more than any other encyclical. “Don’t just do something. Stand there,” one presenter joked, expressing the general disgust of the group with a certain idolization of productivity and efficiency that has become so prominent in America. Likewise, there was a call throughout the conference for wonder, wondering, wandering, and for taking time to be inefficient. (Joe Grabowski, the vice president of evangelization for the Chesterton Society, who ran the conference expertly, observed that the more wonders surround us, the easier it is to lose wonder, quoting Chesterton: “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”) Wonder itself being not a means to some higher profit but a telos unto itself, it may not be the most productive posture possible, but it aligns with the project of being a human, of cultivating sacramental imagination, and of approaching God.
“The coming peril is not Bolshevism,” Pearce warned, quoting Chesterton. “It is standardization by a low standard.” In many ways, that observation captured the entire conference. The threat is not merely political or economic. It is the flattening of human life into monoculture: the standardization of our businesses, schools, neighborhoods, personalities, and imaginations. What is the antidote? For Chesterton—the “Edwardian Socrates,” as Landon Loftin called him—it is not nostalgia but sanity. We must continue to wonder, to wander, and to resist the cult of efficiency. We must recover common sense while defying the reduction of truth into mere pragmatism. We must insist upon human particularity over dehumanizing systems, cultivation over manufacture, creation over consumption, and ultimately life over the culture of death.
Speaking of life, there is life in death among the communion of saints. Many of the participants of the 45th annual Chesterton Conference and the lay apostolate of the Chesterton Society are working to promote the cheerful Englishman’s cause for sainthood. (Some are championing his wife Frances’s as well!) They speak about it with great solemnity by day and mirthfully by night, at the conference’s famous wine-soaked Afterglows. (Joy is, after all, the “gigantic secret of the Christian.”) As America celebrates its 250th anniversary—and as our first American pope revives the kind of “social reform” articulated in The Outline of Sanity, giving us a reason as great as any for patriotism—Chesterton, the apostle of common sense, remains as alive as ever.