Editor’s Note: Matthew Chicoine interviewed Dr. Jared Staudt, via phone on April 10th, 2026. Some of the questions/answers have been rearranged, edited, and paraphrased to provide the best reader experience without losing any integrity of the answers given.
What inspired you and Jason Craig to explore the American Catholic land movement?
We were at the Augustine Institute about 12 years ago and we were reading about Wendell Berry (he was a poet, wrote a series of fictional novels based on his community), John Senior, and Peter Maurin (he had worked with Dorothy Day and gave her the idea of the Catholic Worker Movement). Jason had moved back to his home state of North Carolina and started homesteading. About 3 years ago we moved and became neighbors with him. So the book was a fruit of this friendship we formed along the way.
How do you see the agrarian tradition contributing to the Church’s social teachings today?
One of the problems of modern culture is that we have become so abstracted from nature. Catholic Church social teaching is based on the fundamental command by God to have dominion over the earth. The land is the foundation for social life. We depend on it for our food. The land movement is calling us from this abstraction of modern life. It calls us back to our origin and to be good stewards of our gifts God has given us.