2025 Midwest Conference on Masonic Education Wrap Up

by Christopher Hodapp

The 75th Midwest Conference on Masonic Education in Indianapolis has wound down for 2025, and I'd like to express my deepest thanks to everyone who helped make it a great success. Not only to the other presenters, but to the attendees, as well. 

Speakers at the Conference included Steve Harrison, Heather Calloway, Daniel Gardener, Adam Kendall, Brent Morris and myself.

Among the close to 100 attendees were representatives from 17 different Masonic jurisdictions.

As president of the Conference this year, James Buckhorn did an outstanding job in arranging and organizing the programs, the venue, the meals, and so much more. 

The Grand Lodge of Nebraska will be next year's host.

Those Midnight Freemason guys show up everywhere.

Before the Conference, some of the 'Indiana Friends of Brent' were able to join up with the 
venerable Dr. Morris on Thursday, along with our mascot, Billy the Wonder Goat.

2024 World Conference on Fraternalism in Paris June 13-15

by Christopher Hodapp

The 2024 World Congress on Fraternalism, Freemasonry, and History will be held June 13-15 in Paris at the rue de Cadet headquarters of the Grand Orient de France between June 13th and 15th. 

Convened by the journal, Ritual, Secrecy, and Civil Society, in cooperation with the Policy Studies Organization, France's Museum of Freemasonry and the GODF, this event explores how associations and volunteerism have shaped democracy, politics, and history.

The conference alternates each year between Paris and Washington, D.C.

This international event attracts the top scholars around the world in the field of not just Freemasonry, but of fraternalism of all kinds. It is a part of the Policy Studies Organization's support of research into associations, civility, and the role of non governmental organizations in democracy. 

These ongoing international conferences have been spearheaded and supported by Brother Paul Rich for more than a decade now, and he has been a champion of promoting and pursuing Masonic scholarship on a worldwide basis. A shocking number of U.S. Masons are unaware of his role in this pursuit, as well as his own scholarship, and that is a downright shame. On top of his many accomplishments and honors in the academic world, he is the publisher of numerous books about Freemasonry (among others) through Westphalia Press. 

In conjunction with Paul Rich, Brother Pierre Mollier in France is one of the top Masonic historians in the world. Among his many accomplishments, he is the director of France's incredible Museum of Freemasonry in Paris (Musée dé Franc-Maçonnerie). If you don't know his name or reputation, you need to.

Presenters will include:

Guillaume Trichard, Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France; Pierre Mollier, Curator of Paris' Museum of Freemasonry; Paul Rich, Harvard and George Mason University Professor; Arturo de Hoyos, Scottish Rite Research Society; Josef Wäges; S. Brent Morris, Editor Emeritus of the Scottish Rite Journal; UCLA's Margaret Jacob; John Belton; Andrew Prescott from the University of Glasgow; Cécile Révauger, University Professor Emeritus, Bordeaux University; Pierre Yves Beaurepaire, Nice University Professor; Peter Lanchidi, Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest; Simon Deschamps, Lecturer, University of Toulouse le Mirail; Charles Coutel, Professor Emeritus at the University of Artois; Éric Saunier, Lecturer at the University of Le Havre; Mireille Quivy, Honorary Lecturer, University of Rouen; and Christophe Devillers, Editor-in-chief of Humanisme magazine; and Joachim Grave dos Santos, Archivist of the Grand Orient Lusitanien.

Also presenting will be:

Roger Dachez; Jean-Michel Mathonière; Maurice Weber; Laurent Segalini; Jan Snoek; Gaëtan Mentor; Marcel Clodion; André Combes; Gérard Contremoulin; Colette Léger; Jean-Luc Le Bras; Dominique Jardin; Guillermo De Los Reyes; Laure Caille; Philippe Wiedenhoff; Michel Chomarat; Yves Grange; Antonio Morales; Joaquim Grave Dos Santos; and Wallace Boston.

(See the complete program HERE.)

Because presentations may be made in English or French, simultaneous translations from French-English, English-French are offered for most sessions. The Conference is free of charge, but you need to register on EventBrite if you will be attending – CLICK HERE.

Following each conference, the presented papers are collected and published in the journal, Ritual, Secrecy, and Civil Society. Journals from previous conferences may also be read online or downloaded.

The conferences are held alternatively in Paris (2022, 2024) and in Washington D.C. (2023, 2025). The Washington conferences are held at the historic Quaker Meeting House.

Midwest Conference on Masonic Education May 3-5, 2024 in Minnesota

by Christopher Hodapp

This year's Midwest Conference on Masonic Education will be held May 3-5, 2024 in Bloomington, Minnesota in and around the Masonic Heritage Center on the campus of the Minnesota Masonic Home.

Grand lodges all over the world have long realized the crying need to impart Masonic knowledge to our members. It seems that everybody knows that they're supposed to be providing "Masonic education" to Freemasons. But just how to you get knowledgable Masons who know (or understand) Masonic ritual, history, customs, laws, and all the other intellectual and cultural heritage we possess in our institution the proper tools and training to convert their knowledge and expertise into digestible lessons and into the brains of eager students? The best ritualists and historians don't always make the best teachers. Well, this year's conference will help provide some tools and methods to do just that.

Keynote speaker for this annual event will be Dave Baranek, former Aerial Combat instructor at the U.S. Navy's "Top Gun" Fighter Weapons School at Pensacola. His talk will center on "educating the educators," based on his 20 years of experience of teaching young pilots how to master the complex intricacies and develop the instincts needed for flying F-14 Tomcat planes. You can't get more different subjects than teaching Freemasonry and F-14s, but the methods of educating a widely disparate group of students in arcane subject matter are essentially alike. 

In addition to Baranek's keynote, other speakers and topics will include:

• Terry Tilton, PGM - "Masonic Education – Our Challenges and Opportunities"
• WBs Eric John Erfourth and Daniel Sherry - "MWB Ben Franklin’s Educational methodology and attitudes towards Adult education"
• WB Brad Phelps - "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Masons"
• Scott Wolter – "Templars, Masons & North America"
• Also speaking will be: Nick Settich, Brad Phelps, Markus Müller and Reed Endersbe

The event hotel will be the nearby Marriott in Minnetonka, Minnesota.

For a schedule of speakers, events, vendors and how to register, visit the conference website at www.mcme1949.org

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE (from their website)

The Midwest Conference on Masonic Education was formed in 1949 at a gathering of interested Masons from Illinois (including Alphonse Cerza) and Iowa. The outcome was to continue getting together by establishing its first Annual Meeting which was held in December 1950 in Cedar Rapids IA. The organization is comprised of a loose and ever-changing collection of Masonic educators from Grand Lodge jurisdictions located in  north central States and the Canadian Province of Manitoba. 

Member jurisdictions: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, North Dakota, South Dakota, Manitoba. Other participants frequently include chairs of Masonic Education as well as Grand Lodge officers. 

What We Are About

The aim of the Conference is to promote Masonic Education, in part by providing a forum for educators to gather, freely discuss Masonic issues, socialize, and learn from sharing experiences while building beneficial relationships.


In addition, the Conference initiates special projects such as collecting data on educational practices across all North American jurisdictions, as well as encouraging Masonic research and writing by individual educators.

How We Function

The Conference meets once a year, usually in late April or early May, in one of the member jurisdictions. Responsibility for conducting the Annual Meeting rotates each year, eventually being hosted by all member jurisdictions before repeating.

A typical program schedule includes presentations by well-known Masonic speakers, experiential as well as scholarly participant presentations, roundtable discussions, and jurisdiction reports. Sufficient time is also arranged to provide informal chats among attendees. For more than a half century, our participants have expressed the view that our Conference is well worth the time, effort and cost in order to gain the many benefits from attending and participating.

How the 1960s Really Killed American Freemasonry's Future

When critics of Freemasonry opine that fraternities like ours aren't suited to Modern Man™ or Modern Society™, they might very well be right. But the problem is that those critics don't seem to really know just WHY they are right.

When I was writing Heritage Endures two years ago, I was working on a chapter addressing the thorny issue of membership numbers, and how they have affected American Freemasonry since about 1960. I was writing specifically about Indiana, but I looked out at the larger American landscape to see what grand lodges had done since the 1950s in reaction to falling numbers of men becoming Masons. The short answer is that they made BIG changes, and most were not for the better. 

In my own way, I was engaging in the very sort of monster hunting that I have accused others of in an effort to see just what the original tipping point really was that sent us into a shrinking membership. I never found it before my deadline, but I didn't really care at the time, because I was actually just wanting to chronicle what changes had resulted: things like reduced proficiency standards, one-day classes, printed rituals, open recruitment, advertising, lowering of petitioning ages to 18, and lots more were all done to address shrinking numbers of petitioners and ongoing participation. If you want the stories about those changes, you need to read the book. But those were all effects, not the cause.

Well, I think I've stumbled into it. At least, I think it was a MAJOR cause, if not THE cause. and you might think I'm crazy or just engaging in rank nostalgia for some misty, forgotten era that never existed. And I'm not. 

I'm dead serious.*

It was the death of the McGuffey Readers in America's schools.

In 1837, an American son of Scottish immigrants named William Holmes McGuffey was teaching in Ohio, and he was asked by a Cincinnati printer to devise a series of books to teach children how to read. McGuffey had worked as a traveling teacher since the age of 14, and eventually became a lecturer on theology at Ohio's Miami University. Between 1836-37, he created four volumes of graded readers (eventually expanded to six, with the help of his brother Alexander). The first volume of McGuffey's Eclectic First Reader for Young Children began with the simplest of phrases and the basics of phonics, just as most of us have learned to read today: A cat and a rat. The lad has a hat. See the frog on the log. And so on. Each succeeding chapter and subsequent volumes became more complex as the reading level rose. The books also taught children how to write, showing examples of handwritten sentences, and requiring kids to practice with chalk on slate to emulate them.

The McGuffey Readers became enormously popular almost instantly. They were snatched up by American teachers all over the growing nation, and this coincided with the explosion of demands in the 1820s and 30s for public education in every new state. McGuffey's method was vastly superior to the way the Founding Fathers had learned to read and write, by rote memorization and endlessly writing proverbs in a copybook.

As a direct result of McGuffey's books and the teaching method that came about, the Americans who fought in the Civil War in the 1860s as 20-year olds were the first literate, mass-educated generation in the modern world. That's why Civil War-era letters and diaries from soldiers on both sides of the conflict are so vivid and numerous today, compared to previous eras.

Between the first editions in 1836-37, all the way through 1960, more than 130 million McGuffey Readers were sold, and it has been conservatively estimated that each copy was read by at least ten students. That's how pervasive they were. And that's why when the McGuffey Readers were yanked out of schools in the early 1960s, it has had what is clearly a direct and arguably corrosive effect on society at large, and for the purposes of this story, on Freemasonry itself. Here's why.

The more advanced Readers contained increasingly sophisticated stories and excerpts of what were (and still are) considered the Classics: the Bible, Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, John Milton, Byron, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, founding fathers like Franklin and Jefferson. As children learned to read and the volumes advanced, they were introduced to the great works of literature and taught not to fear them. McGuffey himself was a Scots Presbyterian, a Calvinist at heart, a Biblical scholar, and he taught theology. Consequently, as they progressed, the books instilled his messages of what he saw as universal beliefs, habits and manners in every single student who learned to read using his Reader. The Biblical passages were used to teach moral lessons, not religious or denominational ones. The non-Biblical readings also taught allegories, explained historical events, or told heroic tales of acclaimed heroes of the past. There were poems, tales of excitement and daring, cautionary fables, and countless others that became the shared fabric of what "everybody knew" in America. 

Additionally, McGuffey's method stressed the importance of speaking properly. Generations of children were encouraged to memorize passages from the books to be recited aloud. This was their first experiences in speaking in public, along with the mental discipline of memorization. McGuffey's instructions in the books urged students to engage in discussions to more fully understand what they had read about. In this way, children were taught the basics of logic and public oratory.

In the 1870s after McGuffey's death, his books were revised and the reading passages were updated. At that time, the Readers were given a facelift with new illustrations, and new messages replaced some of the Biblical readings, but certainly not all. Critics had complained that the original books didn't apply to the enormous new waves of immigrants who came to America, which is why they were revised with more specifically American themes at that time. They were made more patriotic in nature, and taught what we call today the civil religion - what later critics sneeringly came to mock as 'middle-class values' in the 1960s and afterward. Even the most innocuous of reading exercises gently nudged messages about responsibilities: bravery, honor, manners, mutual respect, doing good, not being rude, sharing, friendship, industriousness, and charity. In other words, guidelines for being a good citizen.

All of these were in line with what the Founders had regarded as the founding principles that were absolutely necessary to the success of the American experiment of a democratic republic. The Founders agreed that the public was nothing more than a mob if they weren't equipped with a basic moral code they wouldn't violate when no one was looking. That was the only way the new American society could possibly work without falling apart. McGuffey provided that handbook in a pretty effortless manner, even to those who would never set foot in a church or crack open Deuteronomy.

Modern scholars and sociologists want to pig-wrestle McGuffey's Readers (the very few alive today who know about them) into the blame game that hurls race and gender roles into the wider societal slop bucket - and nearly every other discussion these days - but that's not at all a fair estimation of the enormous and pivotal role the Readers had. They became the common currency of general knowledge for nearly every single American child - from the children of millionaires, Supreme Court justices, and captains of industry, right down to the kids of street sweepers, coal miners and ditch diggers. Toney kids from Philadelphia's Main Line, Boston's Beacon Hill, and the FFV's of Virginia in 1950 learned to read the very same stories and learn the same lessons and moral code that freed slaves, illiterate immigrants, and backwoods dirt farmers and their children did in 1870. 

More than any other influence on America, the McGuffey Reader became the great leveler for almost a century and a half.

The Age of Snark didn't begin in the 2000s, it started in the mid-50s. By the 1960s, McGuffey's books were branded as hopelessly out of date and out of touch with "modern society." McGuffey's Readers were put on the chopping block and eliminated in favor of the Dick and Jane stories, blanched of the virtues, patriotism, morals and manners messages. Gone, too, were the standardized Classical reading excerpts found in the more advanced Readers. So were were McGuffy's readings about rural life and ethics, in favor of SRA reading exercises that leaned more heavily on the cynicism and "sophistication" of city dwellers (overwhelmingly New Yorkers) regarding small town life and "middle-class morality."  Thus, the almost universally shared cultural messages passed on to tens of millions of American children each year that made the country so homogenous in attitudes when they entered adulthood - regardless of race, gender, national origin, religion, or social class - were eliminated in less than a decade. The second half of the Baby Boomers became the first generation to learn how to read without McGuffy's guiding voice about ethics, virtue, morality, manners, language, and introduction to the Classics. No generation of American children since has shared that common basis of education on a widespread basis. And what used to be called the 'Melting Pot' of America was replaced by what modern sociology majors call the 'Salad Bowl,' in which we now share very little in common.

With the death of McGuffey's Readers went so much that helped Freemasonry to grow to its enormous size in the 1870s, again in the 1920s, and finally in the 1950s. That common, shared set of principles, morals and literary knowledge that was taught to almost every child all across the country was baked into the cakes of the millions of men who joined (and grew) our Masonic lodges. They all learned it exactly the same way, and even your 80-year old grandparents today can likely still recite some passage they learned as a child in a Reader from memory. Few Americans have ever read the Bible cover to cover in this or any other age. But the passages in McGuffey were everyone's collective knowledge base, because nearly everyone had read them. The reading selections were overwhelmingly optimistic, uplifting, laudatory, and at times cautionary. Consequently, they were even more influential than any church on the mass consciousness of all Americans for 130 years.

Those very same messages were reinforced by the lessons in the fraternal groups that grew by leaps and bounds during the very same era - Freemasonry included (along with the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, the Red Men, the Woodmen, and hundreds more). Consider that those pre-1960s generations were not put off by what many today see as tortured language in the rituals, or Albert Pike's prose. What many modern Masons see as creaky or anachronistic stage plays in the Scottish Rite were common currency up to three generations ago, when your next-door neighbors were still actively involved in local theater groups, and every teenager learned debating and speech making. 

The morality plays of Masonic ritual were analogous to a live theater version of McGuffey for generations of Freemasons. The lessons of Freemasonry that stress virtues like fortitude, justice, temperance and prudence were found as often in McGuffey as in the Old Testament. That was true for members of mainstream grand lodges in the U.S. and Prince Hall-derived ones alike. Take a look at the contents of the Fifth Reader: the second and third readings were lessons about "The Poor Widow" and "The Orphan." There's "The Just Judge" and "Decisive integrity" and "The Intemperate Husband."  There's a passage about "The Festal Board" and "True Wisdom." There's "A Hebrew Tale" and "Death and Life." 

When grand lodges 'back East' like Virginia and Pennsylvania first sent charters for new lodges into the expanding wilderness as America grew westward in the late 1700s, their reasons were simple: to educate and civilize a rough and rugged population in regions that had no formal schools. Masonic lodges didn't carry the denominational baggage that the competing churches did, and they taught something that the churches weren't: how to effectively operate a democratic society in a world that had little experience at it at the time. But Masonry didn't achieve explosive growth until the end of the Morgan Anti-Masonic period and after the end of the Civil War because society was still largely illiterate. The majority of Americans in 1825 would have little or no appreciation of the Liberal Arts and Sciences because they had no experience of the concepts. But a growing number of adult American men over 20 years of age by 1865 DID have a basic understanding, and McGuffey's readers were the reason. And by 1870, grand lodges were chartering lodges by the hundreds each year - so fast that influential Masonic leaders became alarmed that they were growing too big, too quickly.

After American Freemasons topped more than 4 million in 1959, the decline began the very next year from which the fraternity has never rebounded. And it wasn't just the Masonic fraternity, either. Both Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol wrote seminal studies around 2000 that recorded the dramatic plunge in America's voluntary associations and chapter-based organizations of all kinds after 1960 — from lodges like the Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, and Eagles, to PTAs, card-playing clubs, bowling leagues, and the American Red Cross. Church attendance has been in a steady decline since that time, as well. Americans didn't want to associate with each other any more. But we've lost something more than just the desire to be with other people. 

It was by 1960 that the McGuffey Readers were entirely phased out nationally (although it started in the 1930s), and I would argue that Freemasonry and other similar institutions cannot recover because Americans — and all Westerners — no longer share those common cultural guidelines anymore. Freemasonry is, at its core, a Western philosophy that put the ideals of the English and French Enlightenment into concrete practice. But just like the democratic republic of the United States, its success is predicated upon a certain commonality of shared ethics, behavior and knowledge among its potential members. What Freemasonry teaches our members goes hand in hand with the 'civil religion' that the Founders believed to be essential. Without it, the whole thing collapses like last week's leftover broccoli. And that should concern all of us. 

In an age when no one "knows" anything anymore and our collective memory has been replaced by consulting Wikipedia on our iPhones while seeking 'likes' for our Twitter post one-liners, there's a whole lot more in danger now than just fewer Masons showing up for stated meetings. It is probably simplistic to say, but you can arguably trace much of the rank incivility and bleak pessimism that is so rampant today directly to the replacement of McGuffey's lessons by Howard Zinn and his ilk's deliberate anarchy, revisionism, and miserablism in the textbooks that have dominated schools since the late 1960s.

The McGuffey  Readers are still in print to this day, and still being used. In 1985, there were 150,000 sold. Today, they still sell about 30,000 a year, and they remain popular with private schools and home school families. So if I follow this premise to its logical conclusion, Freemasonry may have its greatest future among the young men educated in those types of environments.

But that's another article.

*As we used to say in the advertising business, 'Where do ideas come from? Somebody else!' I veered into this notion of McGuffy's Readers and the effects on society by their disappearance in Charles Murray's brilliant study, Coming Apart (2012). Anyone wanting to explore the death of middle-class mores and culture in the U.S. between 1960 and 2010 needs to start with Murray's book, which statistically lays out his case in black and blue. Murray's a dirty word in academic circles these days, and that's because he can back up his assertions with real facts and figures instead of feelings and opinions. It should be the next book you read after Putnam's Bowling Alone and Theda Skocpol's Diminished Democracy.

POST SCRIPT JULY 29, 2019

Charles Murray's theory of the McGuffey Readers' effects seems to resonated with others. About a month after this was posted here, Jon Miltimore picked up the theme on the Intellectual Takeout website. Have a look at his article A Code of Manhood for a Generation Suffering a ‘Masculinity Crisis’.

PA Academy of Masonic Knowledge Fall Symposium Oct 27th

Twice a year, the Pennsylvania Academy of Masonic Knowledge meets in Elizabethtown, PA, usually presenting two outstanding speakers at each meeting. The Academy meetings are open to any Mason who wishes to attend.
This coming Saturday, October 27th, the Pennsylvania Academy of Masonic Knowledge will host its Fall Symposium in the Deike Auditorium of the Freemasons Cultural Center on the campus of the Masonic Village in Elizabethtown, PA.

 A couple of years back, they began live-streaming these events so that Masons from around their state (and around the world) could participate. The event will begin at 9 AM EST and will run until about 3 PM EST (with plenty of breaks along the way.)

The speakers for this event are Bro. John Michael Greer, noted Druidic and esoteric philosopher speaking of Freemasonry and Secret Societies, and Bro. Tyler Anderson, Grand Historian of the Grand Lodge of New Mexico, speaking on Freemasonry's historical opposition to the KKK. Information on their presentations can be found at:
https://pamasonicacademy.org/meetings/

If you'd like to tune in for the live stream, you can do so at the address below. Note, the live stream will appear the morning of the event.
r/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0YzZtZbNmW9pkbA63EqFgA

If you can't participate Saturday, they will post the videos of the lectures immediately following the event at the link below. Also, you can view previous speakers at that link as well.
https://pamasonicacademy.org/presentations/

SRRS' 'The Plumbline' Bound Collection Now Shipping

"What do we want?"

MASONIC EDUCATION!

"When do we want it?"

NOW!

I seem to hear variations of this chanting in nearly every Masonic Facebook group, in lodge discussions, Reddit threads, Masonic survey results, and seemingly everywhere else I turn in the fraternity. I've been hearing it since the day I joined Masonry almost twenty years ago, and I keep on hearing it. I fact, I keep being told that men leave the fraternity every day because they didn't find any "education" when they came to lodge a few times. "Nobody is educating me!" comes the plaintive cry.

Balderdash.

"Masonic education" is everywhere you look, but YOU HAVE TO LOOK. Freemasonry has been freighted with more than its share of members who just simply refused to read and educate themselves ever since it began, as Albert Mackey lamented in the 1870s. That's a downright shame, because that "Masonic education" members supposedly clamor for is just laying out there, waiting to be picked up and read, if only Brethren would bother to open a book. 

Case in point:

Last week, a five pound box positively crammed full of "Masonic education" thudded onto my doorstep in the form of the latest bonus book of the Scottish Rite Research Society. 

After 27 years of publication, the SRRS has collected together every single issue of their outstanding quarterly newsletter, The Plumbline 1991-2016, into one complete hardbound, facsimile volume. Every page, every article, every photograph is reproduced, and it fills more than 660 pages of indexed gold. 

SRRS members who were dues current in 2016 should be receiving it, if they haven't already.

This huge volume is a godsend. Because The Plumbline was published for all of these years in a six- or eight-page folded newsletter format, the problem all along has been the ephemeral nature of it. They weren't considered disposable to regular readers, yet they were frequently disposed of — Plumblines all too easily got tossed out with the latest stack of frozen steak catalogues and angry bill collection notices. I myself have been painstakingly piling up old issues of The Plumbline since I first joined the SRRS, because there have been indispensable articles in them I didn't want to lose. But there was never an easy way to access all of them, as they were crammed haphazardly into reams of overstuffed 3-inch binders on an upstairs shelf. 

To call The Plumbline a "newsletter" does it a horrible disservice, as the substantive articles that have filled it all these years are NOT lighthearted announcements of meetings, elections, and event dates. They are sometimes papers that were sometimes considered too short to warrant inclusion in the pages of the annual Heredom, but that doesn't mean they were thinner on quality or research or thought-provoking content. And they are not just about the Scottish Rite, either. 

That said, it should be stressed that most of these papers were specially written for The Plumbline and not simply too short for the SRRS's hard-backed, thicker cousin publication. The editor is always on the lookout for articles and papers, ideally of around 3500-4000 words. Over the years, The Plumbline has been edited by Pete Normand, S. Brent Morris, John Boettjer, Forrest Haggard, Jim Tresner, Michael Halleran, Robert M. Wolfarth, and today by Adam Kendall. Adam can be contacted through the Plumbline's website HERE.
There is WONDERFUL information to be found here, by many of the top Masonic authors and researchers of the last three decades – as well as outstanding brethren you may not have heard of before. 

You want to present "Masonic education" at your next lodge meeting? Open this book to any page and start reading at random: I stopped at Paul M. Bessel's Ten Steps To Interesting Masonic Research; Rex Hutchens' The Place of Tradition in Ritual Integrity; Paul Rich's Count Leo Tolstoy and Freemasonry; David Stafford's Freemasonry and the Development of Greek-Letter Fraternities; Jon Crusoe's References the the Craft in the Works of Robert A. Heinlein; Wayne Simon's two-part article on military lodges in the Civil War; Gary Leazer's Mystery Religions and Freemasonry...

The same can be said of the five (soon to be six) hardbound volumes of all of the collected Short Talk Bulletins of the Masonic Service Association (which were also collected, edited and blessedly indexed into their hardback editions by S. Brent Morris). Every lodge should have these books (or even just one or two of them, if too many thick books in the building terrify your members). 

The point is that Masonic education doesn't mean YOU have to go out, research a topic, and present a well-reasoned original paper on a groundbreaking subject no one's ever done before. Freemasonry is such that you could read the EXACT same article aloud in lodge every three years, and you'll have a whole new audience listening (with a handful of exceptions). 

So do your lodge and yourself a favor: get hold of a copy of this book or the MSA's collections, open to any page, and start reading. I promise, it's like popcorn and you won't stop. Then go share it with your lodge Brethren next month.

2nd Annual International Conference on the History of Freemasonry

After the success of last year's first International Conference on the History of Freemasonry in Edinburgh, Scotland, the news comes from author, friend and brother Robert Cooper that more is on the way.

The 2nd ICHF will be May 29th-31st, 2009, and it is now expected that the event will be a biannual conference. The intention is to allow contributors ample time to submit proposals during the call for entries, and, if accepted, to then write their papers. Power Point proposals are encouraged.

From the Grand Lodge of Scotland's website:

ICHF is not a Masonic Conference in the way we Freemasons usually perceive 'Masonic Conferences'. ICHF is quite different in that it is the only conference in the world that brings togther academics who are studying aspects of Freemasonry with Freemasons and members of the public.

ICHF is not a profit making body and if, and when, a surplus is made it will be used for charitable purposes.

It is intended that ICHF will be a biennial event. 2009 is special to Scots as it marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of the National Bard - Brother Robert Burns. It is to be hoped that some of the papers at the conference will cover, for example, the impact that Freemasonry had on the life and work of Brother Burns. This is important as ICHF will move elsewhere in 2011.

Although styled an 'academic' conference it was heartening to see the number of Freemasons and members of the public who attended last year's conference and it is hoped that this will be repeated again next year.

The First Announcement and Call for Papers are now available. More information will soon be available on the conference web site www.ichfonline.org

Course on Freemasonry at Ohio State University

A brother forwarded this article to me from the Grand Lodge of Ohio's The Beacon (page 13):

Students Study Freemasonry at OSU

Worshipful Brother Jose Diaz, a Past Master of York Lodge #563 and an Associate Professor of History, is currently teaching a freshman seminar course entitled "From National Treasure to The Da Vinci Code: Freemasons, Fact, and Fiction" at The Ohio State University.

"I was really surprised by the number of students who wanted to take the class," said Diaz. "At one point, this class had the longest waiting list of any at OSU. I will teach it again in the Spring quarter, and I already have ten students enrolled."

The course syllabus states that by the end of the seminar, students will be able to:
*Understand the origins and history of Freemasonry
*Understand Freemasonry's role in American popular culture
*Search and locate information resources that are helpful in conducting more advanced research in Freemasonry and other fraternal orders
*Understand arguments for and against Freemasonry

The course will meet once a week for nine weeks. Each week will focus on a different topic. The three main textbooks for the class are S. Brent Morris' The Complete Idiot's Guide to Freemasonry, Christopher Hodapp's Freemasons for Dummies, and Mark Tabbert's American Freemasons.

Worshipful Brother Diaz will take his class on a tour of the Grand Lodge museum in Worthington, and will conclude the 9th week with a viewing of the Stonecutters episode of "The Simpsons".