From the Quarries

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of hearing W Bro John Bishop deliver a striking and provocative paper at Lodge Toowoomba.

The paper, ‘Deists, Theists, Atheists, Agnostics, Pagans and Pantheists‘, takes up one of the most delicate questions in Freemasonry: what does the Craft actually require when it speaks of belief in the Great Architect of the Universe?

It is not a comfortable paper, nor is it intended to be. It challenges easy assumptions about belief, morality, religion, pantheism, and the breadth of Masonic thought. In particular, it asks whether the Great Architect must be understood in conventional theological terms, or whether the idea may point toward something wider: nature, order, the universe itself, or the mystery behind all symbolic language.