Russell Kirk as knight-errant

Just one of the great images I carried away after reading this essay by Gleaves Whitney over at The Imaginative Conservative: The Swords of Imagination: Russell Kirk's Battle with Modernity. As Whitney writes:

[T]he knight-errant Russell Kirk imagined his role in existence, set out on a modern-day crusade, and wielded the sword of imagination to defend the permanent things. Kirk was no stranger to military service—he was a soldier during the Second World War—but the war he waged over the better part of five decades was not on a literal but on a metaphorical battlefield. For the Sage of Mecosta, the greatest conflicts in the modern age have not been at Gettysburg, Verdun, or Omaha Beach. These killing grounds are the manifestations of a deeper war—a spiritual, moral, and cultural war waged in the world of images and ideas, a war whose most contested battleground is the imagination of the rising generation.

Kirk and his work provide a very useful model for conservatives to follow in addressing the challenges that face our nation.