A Knight's Blog

It is quite a bizarre experiance when you find greater support, care, and understanding from the secular world than the Church. The institution has failed. A mass exodus is taking place. People are not leaving the faith, they are leaving the community. Christians in the Church system have failed to be relevant to their own congregations. Believers are finding better aid in secular institutions. An example is my own experience. I have gone to Church all my life and sat in a pew almost perpetually. I cannot tell you that any person at any Church I have attended really knows me or that I know them. Everything is obscured and no one seeks to get personal. In stark contrast when I attended an Renaissance Faire, strangers knew a great deal about me. I wore my Crusader armor, tunic, and sword . People knew immediately that I was passionate about The Crusades and that I was a Christian. I spent time with a secular friend of mine at The New Stirling Arms booth and he made me feel valued. In

One dynamic of the Crusades that is often overlooked is the couple. Spouses were frequently separated when husbands "took the cross" and marched for Palestine. The wives were left with a choice; join their Crucinatius (Crusader) husbands or remain behind to tend to their lands. Some women joined in the arduous journey and put themselves at great peril to remain with their husbands. Others fearing the failure of the expeditions to the East stayed and waited with great longing for their beloved's return. In the painting I've chosen for this post you can see a two fold expression. First there is the Crusader, the brash youth offering his sword to the Lord and looking at the altar with awe in his eyes. In contrast his wife is solemn and her lids convey a heaviness of heart; that in her prayers she petitions the Almighty to bring her beloved safely home. Crusading was very much a man's movement. It brought great prestige to knights who came from humble origins. The