Some Larger Way: Teaching What’s Real

The following is adapted from an address given at the Chesterton Academy, Vero Beach, Florida February 19, 2026.

Those of you already engaged in this wonderful institution don’t need me to tell you the inestimable value of reading great books even at an early age. And for those of you who may be discovering this academy for the first time, let me just say that I would have been grateful myself to have been able to attend such a place, which unfortunately did not exist when I was young. It was a great need back then, an even greater one now when we’ve lost even more of our religious and cultural heritage. And I’m not exaggerating when I say that without educational institutions like this one, the days will rapidly grow even darker and more chaotic for both America and Christianity.

But there is a path out, as I’ve tried to suggest in the title above, which is drawn from a poem in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings:

The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Now, like all poems, this one bears multiple meanings, and like all good poems it has a significance beyond even those meanings, because it opens a door to the world, a larger world and some larger way that we must remain aware of if we’re to remain fully human. That, it seems to me, is the crucial value of Chesterton Academies, even as they teach the more usual skills that we all need to manage our lives in our more mundane world.

As I say, I did not have the benefit of a school like this, but I did have two key advantages in addition to growing up in an intact family: a Catholic Church that in its liturgies and schools conveyed a great deal implicitly. I’ve often joked that the young nuns who taught me as a child probably never read Aristotle, or even Aquinas. But the Church that formed them had, and they conveyed that rational sanity of those two great figures, a sanity that meshed perfectly with the ordinary virtues that we also were living out at home.

And there was one more thing: Latin. Like a lot of boys my age, I memorized the responses to what we now call the Traditional Latin Mass – I could still rattle off a number of them today. Memorizing the Latin responses had the advantage that you could serve at Mass – and you could get out of school to serve at funerals, often almost the whole day, and you could get tips at those and weddings. So, Latin has always had a certain baseline affection, and even today Latin words have a certain aura for me.

There was one other experience I had that set me on the larger way that I hope I am still on. It must have been in the late fall of my junior year, right after Thanksgiving, because I played football and the season was over. There were still autumn leaves on the trees. We’d been reading Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin, last period. After school, I was walking with a few friends over to someone’s house under those autumnal colors.

Out of nowhere a sense of the long stretch of time and the recurring seasons and all the people that had lived and died since Virgil’s day, which was also Jesus’, came over me in ways that I still can’t entirely express. But I knew and have known since that there was some larger way – and I have labored ever since to be worthy of it and to convey some portion of it to others.

I wouldn’t say that is the sole purpose of true education, but it’s central. As our newest Doctor of the Church, St. John Henry Newman once remarked, “The problem for statesmen of this age is how to educate the masses, and literature and science cannot give the solution.”

Many people today assume that technical knowledge and government schools are all we need to form citizens and flourishing human lives, with science on the rationalist side and literature or the humanities more broadly on the humanist and emotional side. Newman thinks this is not only wrong but a dangerous delusion, because “deductions have no power of persuasion.”

Now what he means by this has nothing to do with science or reasoning in their proper places. They’re human goods because human reason and intellect are gifts from God. And – under God – may produce many good things.

But this is the most important thing: “deductions have no power of persuasion. . . .Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.” We all know this from being moved by the image of Jesus in Scripture or the influence of a parent, teacher, coach, professor, or pastor.

A martyr is someone willing to stake his very life on a truth. That’s what the early apostles all did, and it converted the greatest political power in their time, the mighty Roman Empire. The arguments and analyses come after that.

By contrast, when years later I was at an Ivy League university, I don’t think I learned much that has stayed with me. Except my stumbling somehow onto the names Chesterton and Dante. Nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum. And one of the most insightful things, among many, that Chesterton wrote is that the problem today is not even that people are ignorant; it’s that they have been taught so many things that aren’t true.

So, having to discover such gems on your own is not ideal – which is why we need schools like this one. For the really great books, we want early encounters and with reliable guides. Because while books are crucial, they’re far from the only thing that’s so.

For example, it wasn’t until Martin Luther that anyone believed in a very dubious proposition: sola scriptura. No book writes or interprets itself. The books of Scripture were defined by the Church. And it takes an authority to be sure they aren’t twisted into meanings they were never intended to have.

A great deal of life and experience went into the production of the Old and New Testaments, and the lives of saints, scholars, martyrs, confessors, priests, religious, and ordinary people holding to basic truths in order to create the tradition that envelops us. We don’t invent these things. We inherit and build on them. The so-called “self-made man or woman” of modern societies is one of the greatest illusions ever perpetrated on the human race.

But there is some truth in the idea, properly understood. Recall the end of the Tolkien poem:  And whither then? I cannot say.

Many people overlook that last line.  Steadiness and a certain security are needed at the start, but ultimately, we must all put out into the deep – where we cannot predict what we will see because that would be to live by a map, not in a living place. Safety to be sure. But for somethings we have to take risks. Sometimes you have to face great risk to achieve what’s great.

And it’s something God Himself wills for us. To be really on the Way – the Way, ἡ ὁδός  in Greek was what the early Christians called their faith – is an adventure. Children like stories of adventure and hope to live them. Jesus called Himself “the way, the truth, and the life.” He is not only some larger way, but the largest way of all.

And so we should all think of ourselves as on His Way because the Christian life, life on God’s earth, is an exciting adventure, unique to each of us in the best sense of unique, not as an exercise in Romantic self-definition, but as an embrace of the singular life that God gives each one of us.

And the same is true of institutions. This academy just opened last fall. So you’re still on your maiden voyage, with many thrills, welcome and unwelcome, ahead. It’s good to be ready for those and to embrace them. There’s an ancient Greek saying, “A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are made for.”

So I wish you many great thrills and adventures as you begin this academic enterprise. Some larger way. And may your tribe increase.

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