Freemasonry: A Study of a Phenomenon

Rating:
Summary: Dense and opaque, but with some interesting parts.
Review: I gather from reading this book that the author has developed and previously published some theoretical or psychological model for analyzing religions. In this volume, he applies his analytical approach to the question of whether Freemasonry is a religion, which seems appropriate enough given Freemasonry's ritual and esoteric content. His explanation of his model and its jargon is even more impenetrable than the jargon itself. His discussion of his results suffers accordingly. The book becomes a bit more worthwhile in discussing why men join the fraternity (at least in England where his research was done), why they stay, who they are, what they get out of it, and what they do behind those closed doors. His unsurprising conclusion, as near as I can tell, is the same answer you would get by asking any random Freemason whether the fraternity was a religion.

(This book was originally published in hardcover under the title "Who's Afraid of Freemasons?".

Rating:
Summary: excellent philosophical enquiry into a religious phenomenon
Review: This book deals with Freemasonry as a phenomenon, which is to say it concerns itself with freemasonry's role as an object of conciousness, as the starting point for an enquiry into not whether it is a religion or not, but into how popular/public (including freemasons')conceptions of freemasonry and by extension 'religion' may be formed. The author's findings suggest that any thinking on religion acquires, or rather is analogous to, religiousness itself, in so far as 'religiousness' as an idea, as an object of conciousness, that is as a 'concept', has, by its very conceivability, acquired an ontological status already equivalent to the initial 'epistemological' premise.