The Countermarch

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.

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

Place & the Particular

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)

From the Archive

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)

From the Archive

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)

Forward March

The Unexamined Idea

Choosing an idea is different from making it your own.

The Countermarch

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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

A carved Pietà of Mary holding the body of Christ in the Cathedral of St. Bartholomew, Frankfurt, Germany. (Photo by Scott P. Richert.)

The Fullness of the Truth

What our senses fail to fathom

A man types on a laptop at a wooden desk beside coffee and a notebook. The screen shows a passage about putting an idea into words. (AI-generated image)

I Have an Idea

How do I know? I wrote it down.

An archon guides a scroll-bearing seeker through a gate; another casts a seeker and burning scroll into the abyss. Christ and two disciples walk to Heavenly Jerusalem. (AI-generated image)

All Truth Is God’s Truth

Truth isn’t meant to be hidden.

Six conspirators sit before press cameras with their faces illuminated and an open red dossier displayed on the table. (AI-generated image)

Hiding in Plain Sight

Conspiracy theories in the age of Trump, Part 2

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