The idea of The Countermarch began with three speeches I delivered between September 2016 and March 2017, all of which were adapted into installments of The Rockford Files, my long-running column in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Or rather, it began decades earlier, long before I came to Chronicles, when, as a political-theory major, I became convinced that the underlying disorder of the modern age was the deliberate politicization of every area of human life. This Long March Through the Institutions has conditioned us all to approach the most basic institutions of civilization, including our families and our faith, through the narrow lens of politics. Yet, as we used to say at Chronicles, “There are no political solutions to cultural problems.” Any restoration of the way we were meant to live must come from some other source.

Thus The Countermarch, a deliberate attempt to restore sanity to human life by returning politics to its proper, narrow sphere and encouraging each of us to take responsibility for the things we can control. We don’t have to fix everything; we cannot fix everything. All we can do—all we are called to do—is to love God, and to love our neighbor, wherever that may take us. One step at a time.

About Scott P. Richert

I’m the publisher for OSV, the world’s largest English-language Catholic publishing house. Before coming to OSV in June 2017, I was at The Rockford Institute and Chronicles of American Culture for 22 years, where I served (among other duties) as executive editor of Chronicles and director of Chronicles Press. A native of Spring Lake, Michigan, I have been married since 1992 to Amy Thalhammer Richert and am the proud father of eight children. Amy and I and some of those children reside in Huntington, Indiana, just up the street from Saint Mary’s Catholic Church, where Father John Francis Noll founded Our Sunday Visitor in 1912. We, however, attend Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church, a block away.