Stephen Masty
If it sounds like an Indiana Jones movie recast with the Sage of Mecosta, you’re not so wrong. It’s a real mystery involving real medieval Crusaders; it’s full of action and adventure, it co-stars the Father of Modern American Conservatism, and it may help to explain the Bohemian Tory’s famous wanderlust, imagination and romance. Chuck that trashy Dan Brown novel and bring out the popcorn!
It opens forty years ago on a lonesome country road between Hillsdale College and Dr. Russell Kirk’s ancestral home in Mecosta, Michigan. Your servant was driving as the cigar-smoking sage told gripping tales from mythic romance to history and back again. Early in the Great War, he recounted, huge bearded warriors emerged from deep in the mountains of the Caucasus, wearing rusty Crusader armour and wielding ancient broadswords as though they had been recently awakened from a sorcerer’s spell after eight long centuries asleep. They heard that Christendom was under siege once more and so they came to fight again: spectators were dazzled and mystified. Truth lurks in the legend.
Flash back to the 1930s and Plymouth, Michigan. Ford’s model factories produce Model A Fords and teenaged Russell Kirk’s father works on the railway. Fast-forward to World War Two which the newly uniformed Kirk (born in 1918) spends depressed in the Utah deserts, keeping his spirits up by reading voraciously. Thereafter, more famously, he travels to Scotland (where he remains the only American to have gained an earned, not honorary, Doctor of Letters degree from the prestigious St Andrews University), writes his seminal The Conservative Mind and enters history.
Kirk travels extensively in Classical Lands including North Africa, and further besides. He seeks out princes stripped of their kingdoms, mystical saints who wrestle with Lucifer, poets and scholars and blind painters, bullfighters and brawlers and ghosts. » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/01/russell-kirk-richard-halliburton-lost-crusaders-stephen-masty.html