The Countermarch

A copy of Wendell Berry’s Dispatches from Rural America: Sixteen Essays against a sunlit stone wall. (Photo by Scott P. Richert)

Letters & Reading

Walking with Wendell Berry

Continuing the great conversation

The Richert children in Halloween costumes pose beside a tree with orange pumpkin candy buckets. (Photo by Scott P. Richert)

Faith Incarnate

Halloween, Jack Chick, and Anti-Catholicism

Uncovering the anti-Catholic origins of the attack on Halloween

Two glowing jack-o'-lanterns sit on a stone wall in front of a porch. (Photo by Scott P. Richert)

Faith Incarnate

Did Pope Benedict XVI Condemn Halloween?

An instructive example of how myths get started

A weathered cannon on a circular iron track faces the sea from a stone coastal fort. (AI-generated image)

Forward March

Principles and Propositions

Reflections on ideology, tribalism, and partisanship

Scott P. Richert makes a presentation to Pope Leo XIV on December 10, 2025, at Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City.

Faith Incarnate

The True Grandeur of Humanity

What is the source of our consciousness?

The eight Richert children sit on a stone-walled flowerbed in front of their former home in Rockford, Illinois. (Photo by Amy J. Richert)

Forward March

Where There’s a Will

You’re likely to find a way.

Blessed Fulton J. Sheen on the Jumbotron at the Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis before his Beatification Mass. (Photo by Scott P. Richert)

Faith Incarnate

A Reflection from My Daily Holy Hour

In my end is my beginning.

The Countermarch

Returning to sanity, one step at a time.

Latest

An older hand passes a worn photograph to a younger hand above an open box of prints on a wooden table. (AI-generated image)

Incarnate Memory

Having entrusted our memories to the cloud, are we in danger of dispossessing ourselves?

An older colleague hands a magazine to an editor marking up loose page proofs with a red pencil at a sunlit desk. (AI-generated image)

Success(ion)

What has a leader really built if the work cannot outlast him?

An editor works at his computer after dark while his daughter waits in the doorway holding a book. (AI-generated image)

Picking Apples

Saving labor is not the same as saving time.

An opened red capsule beside a milk-glass dish filled with red and blue capsules reveals its powdery contents. (AI-generated image)

The Unexamined Idea

Choosing an idea is different from making it your own.

A grandmother and her granddaughter sit in warm light at the kitchen table, seen through the window of a stone house. (AI-generated image)

Meet Me at Mary’s Place

We’re gonna have a party.

A moonlit residential street in Huntington, Indiana, leads toward an illuminated church steeple. Photo by Scott P. Richert.

Footsteps and Memories

The dead still speak, if we have ears to hear.

In the style of a social-realist painting, men leave a shadowed factory as children and spouses welcome them into the golden light of home. (AI-generated image)

Remotely Present

Placing work at the service of life

Wendell Berry sits between two women on a stage at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville. (AI-assisted restoration of a photograph by Scott P. Richert.)

Incarnation and Human Scale

Why are so many Catholics drawn to Wendell Berry?

A number of Wendell Berry’s novels and collections of short stories sit on a red wooden bookshelf. (Photo by Scott P. Richert)

Do This in Memory of Me

Wendell Berry and Catholic fiction

Volumes of Wendell Berry’s essays sit on a black bookshelf. (Photo by Scott P. Richert)

Beyond Consilience

Wendell Berry on E.O. Wilson

A human hand passes a red apple with a bite taken out of it to the open wooden-and-brass hand of an automaton. (AI-generated image)

The Original Sin of AI

Why we can’t create a system that’s better than us

A sunset over calm water off Mackinac Island, framed by dark pine trees and a stone wall. Photograph by Scott P. Richert.

Leisure and the Lake

Cultivating the sound of silence

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