Templar Edification

The Society of the Holy Trinity (STS) is a pan-Lutheran Order dedicated to helping pastors to fulfill our ordination vows. We gather, pray, learn, eat, celebrate, and worship together, through both the Liturgy of the Hours (i.e., offices of prayer at regular hours of the day) and the Divine Liturgy of Word and Sacrament. We hold these retreats quarterly, with our local Chapters each assembling three times a year, and the General Retreat of the entire Society convening annually. For over a decade, our General Retreat took place at Mundelein Seminary outside of Chicago, a lovely spot reminiscent of Narnia. This summer, however, will be our first at Saint Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana. I had to look up the legend of St Meinrad. As the story goes, Meinrad of Einsiedeln was a ninth-century Benedictine priestmonk in modern Switzerland, known ever after as the “Martyr of Hospitality.” He established a hermitage on the slopes of the Etzel Pass, only then to move deeper into the wilderness due t...

By: Eric Thiem In April’s education on the history of Cryptic Council, a small portion of the article mentioned degrees that were initiated in a Council of Cryptic Masons that were no longer performed. One of those, the Knights of the Round Table was discussed in detail and presented in the August 2025 Beauseant and Buckler. I decided to delve into another of the “Dead Degrees,” the Order of the Garter and determine if I could uncover the history of this degree. A garter is a functional piece, or band of clothing of an elastic nature designed to hold up another piece of clothing, usually a stocking or a shirt sleeve (1) . They were typically tied to the stocking just below the knee. With advances in modern clothing, they have lost their use as a functional piece of clothing. The history of a garter being a functional piece of clothing dates back to at least the Middle Ages, if not earlier. For most of history, they have been associated with a bridal tradition; symbolizing luck at the c...

I saw a post online the other day, which claimed that 49% of Minnesotans—less than half—say that they believe in God. Now, I don’t put much weight behind such polls, however they gather their data. I remember reading recently that 30% of self-identified atheists also affirm that they believe in God. Try to make that one make sense. But the very notion of “believing in God” is something of a category error, a confusion of terms. Most people who deny belief in God are thinking of a god; that is, of a powerful yet limited supernatural or spiritual creature of some sort, akin to what Jews and Christians might call angels, or even fae. Yet God is not a god. God, in the classical sense—as understood by the great monotheisms, including Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Baháʼí, Zoroastrians, Platonists, and, I would argue, certain strains of Buddhism—is not a part of Creation, not a being within the universe, not even properly an object of belief; because God is not an object, not a th...