Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was the author of some thirty-two books, hundreds of periodical essays, and many short stories. Both Time and Newsweek have described him as one of America’s leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when in 1998 it wrote that Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement.”

Russell Kirk & the Lost Crusaders

By |2025-01-01T15:31:59-06:00January 1st, 2025|Categories: Christendom, Myth, Russell Kirk, Stephen Masty, Timeless Essays|

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 [...]

Ignoble Treasure: Russell Kirk’s “Fate’s Purse”

By |2024-12-24T14:21:58-06:00December 22nd, 2024|Categories: Ghost Stories, Literature, Russell Kirk|

Greed—like gluttony or sloth—is not conducive to human flourishing. Regarding greed, Russell Kirk commented, “Avarice, rather, is desiring more wealth than one’s soul can support properly. Avarice sometimes produces present poverty: the miser, proverbially, is ragged and lean.”[i] When he chose to personify greed in his fiction, Kirk had to look no further than his [...]

Is “Americanism” a Heresy?

By |2024-11-07T20:29:05-06:00November 7th, 2024|Categories: American Republic, Catholicism, History, Russell Kirk|

Orestes Brownson believed that there must reside a sanction for justice and order which cannot be found apart from religious principles. Without such sanctions, we fight the same battles in political season after political season under the various ideologies intending to make America great again; but only the standards of those “permanent things” taught by [...]

The Mystic Chords of Memory: Reclaiming American History

By |2024-11-05T10:16:06-06:00November 4th, 2024|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, History, Russell Kirk, St. John's College, Timeless Essays, Wilfred McClay|

Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Without memory there are no workable rules of conduct, no standard of justice, no basis for restraining passions, no sense of the connection between an action and its consequences. A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous. I am delighted to be with [...]

Saint Russell of Mecosta?

By |2024-10-31T18:02:23-05:00October 31st, 2024|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Catholicism, Christianity, Russell Kirk, Sainthood, Timeless Essays|

As shocking as it might seem to those who knew Russell Kirk as a bad (in terms of practice) Catholic, he deserves sainthood. Here is my case for Saint Russell of Mecosta. When I first started reading the works of Russell Amos Augustine Kirk in the fall of 1989, that most joyously fateful of seasons, [...]

Horror and Eternity: Russell Kirk’s Ghostly Tales

By |2024-10-29T19:45:09-05:00October 29th, 2024|Categories: Ancestral Shadows, Books, Film, Heaven, Mystery, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays|

Russell Kirk’s horror stories are fundamentally conservative, insinuating a chain of being that connects the living and the dead, reminding us of our duty and obligations to the past. They challenge us by piercing our day-to-day sense of the temporal with bright flashes of eternal order. And they lay upon us the heavy but joyous [...]

Mecosta & the Ghost in the Machine

By |2024-10-23T12:37:42-05:00October 23rd, 2024|Categories: Ancestral Shadows, Books, Russell Kirk, Stephen Masty, Timeless Essays|

Ghost stories have been killed by a ghost—by the ghost in the machine of television, a murder not without irony. Hidden among the posh townhouses and expensive offices of Mayfair is the Savile Club, resembling a merry old English squire with threadbare cuffs. In the library upstairs above the black leather club-chairs, relics of the [...]

October for Russell Kirk

By |2024-10-18T20:56:33-05:00October 18th, 2024|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Russell Kirk, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Russell Amos Augustine Kirk is one of America’s foremost and most important thinkers, especially in the desiccated and mutilated 20th century, an era of horrific inhumanities and incessant blood-letting. Kirk stood for a more humane age that valued the dignity and uniqueness of each human person and that unabashedly sought the good, the true, and [...]

The Other Side of the Keyhole: Russell Kirk’s Ghost Stories

By |2024-10-17T21:57:11-05:00October 17th, 2024|Categories: Books, Robert M. Woods, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays|

During my years of teaching, I have frequently admonished students with this deeply held conviction. If you can find a cultural critic or essayist that you enjoy, and he or she also happens to write fiction—read it. While Russell Kirk (1918-94) is best known as one of the founding fathers of post-World War II conservatism, [...]

Eternity in Time: Augustine, Russell Kirk, & Christopher Dawson

By |2024-08-29T13:13:36-05:00August 29th, 2024|Categories: Catholicism, Christian Humanism, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Russell Kirk, St. Augustine, Timeless Essays|

For Dawson and Kirk, St. Augustine served as both the lodestar in confronting the evils of the world and as a means by which the modern traditionalist should navigate in turbulent ideological waters. One would be hard pressed to find a greater influence on two of the finest Catholic Humanists of the twentieth century, Christopher [...]

Gather Round the Hearth to Enjoy Things

By |2024-08-22T21:54:34-05:00August 22nd, 2024|Categories: Glenn Davis, Old Republic, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

How do we redeem the time? We start by "brightening the corner where we are," by improving ourselves, by helping our neighbors, by loving our families, by setting high standards for our students, and by exercising the inherited liberty bequeathed to us from the founders, responsibly, yet joyfully. With the Louisiana Purchase, the original republican [...]

The Truth of Beauty: Educating the Moral Imagination

By |2024-07-19T21:33:44-05:00July 19th, 2024|Categories: Beauty, Benjamin Lockerd, C.S. Lewis, Russell Kirk, Senior Contributors, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays, Truth|

The answers to the errors of modern times need to be given in philosophy and theology, but it is essential that we also experience the truth imaginatively. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. —Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” These famous lines of Keats [...]

The Imaginative Conservative: 14 Years of Preserving & Advancing

By |2024-07-11T10:08:05-05:00July 9th, 2024|Categories: Aristotle, Bradley J. Birzer, Cicero, Reason, Russell Kirk, Senior Contributors, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays|

May we always defend like Socrates and Cicero and Thomas More. May we always preserve like the monks of Lindesfarne. May we always see the world through the eyes of Russell Kirk, Christopher Dawson, and T.S. Eliot. May we always cherish the humanity and the divinity of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity. [...]

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