Dale Ahlquist was born in
St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 14, 1958. Ahlquist received his B.A. from
Carleton College in
Northfield, Minnesota, and a M.A. from
Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Ahlquist received an honorary doctorate from the
University of Mary in 2024. Dale Ahlquist was raised in a
Baptist household observing the developing fragmentation of
Protestant denominations. Reading
G. K. Chesterton’s
The Everlasting Man during his honeymoon in Rome led to research into the
Early Church Fathers and the history of the
Catholic Church. Ahlquist saw his objections to Catholicism on matters of the
papacy, the
sacraments of the Catholic Church, and the
Blessed Virgin Mary be refuted. In 1996, he founded the American Chesterton Society. He converted to Catholicism in 1997, along with his two oldest children Julian and Ashley. His wife, Laura, who had not been a practicing Catholic when they met, also returned to the church. In 2000, Ahlquist quit his job as a political lobbyist to run the American Chesterton Society full-time, which is a non-profit organization co-founded by Dale Ahlquist in 1996 with the mission of promoting interest in English author,
G. K. Chesterton. In 2008, Dale Ahlquist and Tom Bengtson founded the
Chesterton Academy, a high school in
Hopkins, Minnesota, based on
G. K. Chesterton’s ideas of integrated learning. ==References==