‘Skene Conference tickets are on sale’

    

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Tickets for this year’s John Skene Memorial Conference in New Jersey are on sale!

Make sure you will be available Saturday, August 23 for a full day of Masonic learning, feasting, and celebrating the life of Bro. John Skene, whose emigration from Scotland to the West Jersey colony in 1682 made him the first Mason in the New World.

The Speakers

Dr. Susan Mitchell Sommers, Professor of History at Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania, has spent an inordinate sum of time and energy researching and writing about Freemasonry. If I’m not mistaken, she soon will publish a book on James Anderson, the subject of her talk at this conference.

Bob Cooper, retired curator of the Grand Lodge of Scotland and co-host of the amazing Masonic Authors Guild International podcast, also is an author of Masonic books and frequent speaker on the lecture circuit. He is known for untwisting confusing skeins (see what I did there?) in Scottish Masonic history, from Templar nonsense and Rosslyn Chapel to modern times, and will present current scholarship on John Skene.

The opening act, inexplicably, will be the Magpie Mason. Basically, I am a holdover from last year’s conference, which was canceled because something called the Masonic Restoration Foundation chose the same Saturday to host its annual symposium just across the river in Philly. I will present my talk on Thomas Reid, which explains precisely how a key treatise of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy came to be quoted at length in the lecture of the Fellow Craft Degree employed by most lodges in America.

Magpie file photo

Plus, there will be a memorial program at the site (approximately) of Skene’s final resting place, and a cocktail hour the night before, and dinner after the conference.

I hope we can find a place to smoke too. I still have a little of the Hebrides pipe mixture I bought at John Crouch Tobacconist during the Scottish Freemasonry in America Symposium in Virginia a few years ago.

Tickets are priced according to preference. One need not attend all the events, but the symposium/dinner combo costs a very reasonable seventy bucks.

Hope to see you there.