‘The Masonic Con with a mission’

    

The Grand Lodge of New York’s first Masonic Con is this Saturday, so buy your tickets now. Masonic Con New York will examine Freemasonry in the 21st Century: Self and Society—a look at where our fraternity should go as modern America suffers from an epidemic of male loneliness, as documented in the recent study from the U.S. Surgeon General.

Click here.

Freemasonry, as a path of self-development, as a social network, and as an influential and history-making institution, bears the potential to remedy the crisis facing so many American men. Come here our speakers discuss the ideas behind this Masonic Con with a mission:

Keynote Speaker

Maj. Gen. William Green, Jr.

Chief of Chaplains

U.S. Army

—with—

 

Dr. Heather K. Calloway

Executive Director

Center for Fraternal Collections

and Research, Indiana University

MW Akram Elias

Past Grand Master

Grand Lodge of the District of Columbia 

Bro. Bull Garlington

Author and Attorney

Bro. Michael LaRocco

Executive Director

Chancellor Robert R. Livingston

Masonic Library

Bro. Jim Loporto

On “The Elephant in the Room”

This day of Masonic and social studies is open to the public, except for Bro. Loporto’s presentation at day’s end, which will be restricted to regular Freemasons, with an emphasis on seating Apprentices, Fellows, and new Master Masons.

Mariners 67

The weekend will begin Friday, January 17 with the famous Mariners Lodge 67’s Maritime Festive Board and Beefsteak Banquet. That’s a separate ticket for a magnificent meal in an unforgettable ambiance of feast and song. This is the kick-off of the lodge’s bicentennial celebration.

The speakers program awaits you on Saturday the 18th, also featuring tours of Masonic Hall, plenty of vendors, and other attractions.

Click here.

Afterward, the 1781 Society welcomes you for cocktails and socializing with our speakers and with Grand Master Steven A. Rubin and our Grand Lodge leadership. (This too requires a separate ticket.)

There are group rate hotel accommodations and special rate parking as well.

Questions? Contact me here.

     

‘The other ALR’

    

There’s another “ALR” in the research lodge world. The Grand Lodge of New Hampshire set to labor Anniversary Lodge of Research 175 in 1964. This lodge offers several eye-catching events each year, and I really want to visit sometime.

For starters, it has received dispensation to open a table lodge next month. The brethren will gather on Friday the 28th at six o’clock in the Masonic Temple in Concord. Book your seat here, but hurry because only thirty can be accommodated.

What I really want to check out is the annual Tri-State Masonic Day of Light, set for Saturday, August 9. This event unites the research lodges of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont for a meeting of sharing their best papers. From what I understand, the location rotates among those three states, and this year it too will be in Concord. (There’s a possibility of the Masonic Restoration Foundation hosting its symposium in, I think, Ontario that weekend, but that date is yet to be announced. I’d like to be there too, so I’m hoping these won’t coincide.)

But the ALR event I most want to attend is its annual meeting. This happens every July 8 at the William Pitt Tavern in Portsmouth—the very place and the anniversary in 1789 of the founding of the Grand Lodge. This sixty-first birthday will land on a Tuesday, so I doubt 2025 is my year to be there, but some day.

     

‘Who knew ghosts could be so boring?’

    

Kalani Ghost Hunter

I am agnostic on the question of ghosts, spirits, etc. being somehow among us. I suppose anything is possible, but I’m wary of most of the living people around me, so maybe I have no interest in co-existing with those who’ve predeceased us. Whatever the truth may be, I want to think a video produced by—cough—“ghost hunters” would entertain with a little suspense, wonder, and perhaps even a smattering of fright, but we’re safe from all that in this recent production of Kalani Ghost Hunter, uploaded to YouTube Sunday.

The team visited the former Huntington Masonic Temple in Indiana which, you may remember, was purchased in 2017 by the Cannizzaro family to be their residence.

The ghost hunters make clear they know nothing about Freemasonry—not only by admitting it outright, but also by demonstrating their nescience through stupid commentary. Did you know the number eight has “significance” to Freemasonry? Me neither. 

Maybe I’m nitpicking, but if you aim to show the world an hour-and-twenty-minute(!) video on ghosts in a former Masonic lodge room, you ought to make some effort to familiarize yourself a little with the Masons. It’s not that the number eight would come up in your reading—it wouldn’t— but you would arm yourself with enough basic facts to inform your questions to the apparitions. Alas, all we have here are a few people trying to converse with an empty room.

I suffered the eighty minutes so you don’t have to. Oh, this episode is titled “TRAPPED inside a MASONIC TEMPLE.” No one was trapped, and it’s no longer a Masonic temple.

     

‘Freemasonry in NYC during the Civil War’

    

Fresno Masonic Hall

California is far beyond my orbit, but let me apprise the brethren in and near Fresno of a lecture in two weeks. W. Bro. James Russell, of Perfect Square Lodge 204 in the Seventh Manhattan District, will present “Freemasonry in New York City During the Civil War” on Tuesday the 21st at seven o’clock.

Fresno Masonic Hall is located at 3444 East Shields Avenue. Attire: casual. Refreshments will be served.

(This is not a lodge meeting night—that’s the first Wednesday—but the brethren get together on Tuesdays for fellowship and education.)

Bro. James also is at labor in Fresno Lodge 247, and is a new Corresponding Member of The American Lodge of Research—and I’m trying to interest him in Civil War Lodge of Research, but one step at a time!

     

‘Masons in the American Revolution’

    

In New Jersey, Bergen250, Bergen County’s commemoration of the semiquincentennial anniversary of America’s Founding, will present Bro. Lee Justo next Wednesday in its Revolutionary War Roundtable program. Lee, who is at labor in Huguenot Lodge 46 in Westchester, will present “Masonic Brothers in the American Revolution.”

This will take place at 7 p.m. at 1 Bergen County Plaza (fourth floor) in Hackensack.

The county’s Speaker Series for 2025 thus far looks like it focuses on military aspects of the American Revolution, which makes sense because New Jersey was the site of the most battles in the war.

If you don’t know Lee, he is, among other things, the Grand Lodge of New York’s coordinator of our Lafayette bicentenary events.

     

‘New WM coming to NJ LORE’

    

Happy New Year, everybody!

If, for some reason, you choose not to attend Masonic Con New York on the eighteenth, you ought to visit New Jersey Lodge of Masonic Research and Education 1786 for its Installation of Officers. Bro. Don was elected to the Solomonic Chair last month, and there is a corps of eager officers supporting him.

The lodge meets at Freemasons Hall in North Brunswick, home of Union Lodge 19.