He did this by discovering he liked the rural South, southerners, and traditional culture better than the materialistic one he was immersed in in Chicago, because it was more humane, spiritual, and poetic, so he started returning to his roots in North Carolina. His wasn't some political or evangelical conversion, it was what he called a "Agrarian southern religious conversion." Meaning he reconnected to his roots, his family, his ancestry, his native religion, and his folkways, even though he stayed on as a philosophy professor at U of Chicago. Tragically, he died young in his late 50s, and I wonder what could have been had he lived another 30 years because he was truly a genius.
This is a beneficial and prophetic essay of his on how to remain human and sane in an age of science, written in 1963, but amazingly it reads like it was written yesterday. One could only wonder what Weaver would write now, with "smart" phones, internet streaming, "social" media, etc.
Dealing with the effect of technology constructively is one of the best things we can do to be healthy in these frantic times we live in. This essay is well worth the read.
"The ideal of the human under the aegis of something higher provides the strongest counter-pressure against the fragmentation and barbarization of our world…" - Richard Weaver
Click on the link below to read the essay: "Humanism in the Age of Science" by Richard Weaver

humanism_in_an_age_of_science_~_the_imaginative_conservative.pdf |