As a practicing academic I have a great fondness for the essay both as a means of conveying information and as a tool to help me think through ideas that interest me. I write essays for various reasons. I write them to investigate issues, I write them for my own amusement, I write them to clarify my ideas, I write them because people ask me to comment on particular topics, I write them to send out in newsletters and I write them because I am invited to give public lectures and need to prepare the material I want to deliver.
All the essays I write end up stored somewhere in the murky recesses of my data storage system where they remain to haunt me when I stumble across them while looking for something more important. It cannot be denied that among them I have essays written about a whole range of Masonic topics which I think are interesting.
Recently one of my publishers happened to email me about a particular topic and I casually mentioned I had written something about it. What have you written? Came back the reply. I promptly retrieved an essay on the topic, attached it to the email and sent it off.
Their reply came back quickly. Have you got any more of these essays?
They grow in my backup drives like mould on a damp wall, I replied.
In that case why not put together a collection of your favourites? They said.
So I delved into the bowels of my hard drive and here is the result. Each essay is a self-contained unit that poses a question and then tries to answer it. There is no particular theme to the collection, except Freemasonry. I have included essays about the philosophy of Freemasonry, about its past, its present practice and its possible futures. Some are formally documented and referenced, some are not, some are written for the general public and assume no prior knowledge and others are written as a Freemason writing for other Masons. They span a period of seventeen years. Amongst them you find many ideas that I have later written about more fully in various books. These essays are where these many of my ideas started life. You will also find some essays I wrote simply to clarify my own thoughts or to explain why I felt as I do about some issues.
I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.
All the essays I write end up stored somewhere in the murky recesses of my data storage system where they remain to haunt me when I stumble across them while looking for something more important. It cannot be denied that among them I have essays written about a whole range of Masonic topics which I think are interesting.
Recently one of my publishers happened to email me about a particular topic and I casually mentioned I had written something about it. What have you written? Came back the reply. I promptly retrieved an essay on the topic, attached it to the email and sent it off.
Their reply came back quickly. Have you got any more of these essays?
They grow in my backup drives like mould on a damp wall, I replied.
In that case why not put together a collection of your favourites? They said.
So I delved into the bowels of my hard drive and here is the result. Each essay is a self-contained unit that poses a question and then tries to answer it. There is no particular theme to the collection, except Freemasonry. I have included essays about the philosophy of Freemasonry, about its past, its present practice and its possible futures. Some are formally documented and referenced, some are not, some are written for the general public and assume no prior knowledge and others are written as a Freemason writing for other Masons. They span a period of seventeen years. Amongst them you find many ideas that I have later written about more fully in various books. These essays are where these many of my ideas started life. You will also find some essays I wrote simply to clarify my own thoughts or to explain why I felt as I do about some issues.
I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.
