Reader: This article was included as my Templar Times Grand Editeur piece in the October issue of the Times. It is so important to Temple Church, I am taking the liberty of reposting it here in the “Battlefield Report,” just in case you missed the Templar Times version. After prayer and deliberation, it seemed like the right thing to do! —————————————— Yes, it is true, my fellow Templar. If you have taken the solemn Oath and have been touched with the sword of the accolade, then you have been instilled with a remarkable superpower – one that you should certainly…

As an engineer and scientist, I have learned after three quarters of a century of observation that the world that we live in is all about the quantum reality that underlies it all. Anyone who perceives only the classical world that we view with our eyes understands merely an anecdotal abstraction, not the true reality that underlies everything. As an ordained minister, I have likewise learned by observing endless wars on timeless battlefields that they are merely expressions of an underlying handful of foundational truths. These are fundamental, unalterable realities on which literally everything is built and connected – even…

The Joint C&I of the Priory of The Holy Trinity and the Priory of The Temple Church commenced at 3:30 PM on Friday, 3 October 2025, with the Mandatory Postulant Training for the 3 Holy Trinity and 2 Temple Church Postulants conducted by Temple Church Master of Postulants Claudia Chamberland and Prior Dennis Chamberland. This session finalized the series of 10 Units of SMOTJ Templar pre-Accolade electronic training provided to the Postulants. The Priors’ Reception and Dinner on Friday, 3 October, at Zarella’s Italian Restaurant, Cape Canaveral, began at 5:00 PM. There were 38 attendees. Deputy Grand Prior, H.E. Chev….

  As consciousness returned, Templar Knight Gerard de Chartres suffered in a suffocating heat with an overwhelming, smoke-filled stench that he had always imagined hell would be like, and a heavy maw of darkness and pressure smothered him as it relentlessly tightened around him. His body was wracked with searing pain in so many places that he could not fix on any one part of his being that was not in agony. He was sure that his eyes were open, but he could see almost nothing through the oppressive mass burying him, and with his vision restricted by the dim…

  “A Shortfall of Gravitas” You may have heard this expression before. It is the name given by Elon Musk to one of his drone ships in the Atlantic, whose home port at Cape Canaveral is less than a mile from our October C&I hotel. With any luck, we will be able to see it firsthand at Saturday’s fellowship breakfast. On its deck may rest a recovered Falcon-9 booster, just a couple of hundred yards across the channel from our venue, Grills Seafood Deck Portside. The droneship’s name originates from a series of science fiction books by author Iain M….

  Honor, Devotion, Courage, and Love The Sacred Duty of Mentorship   An organized mentorship process represents the future of any organization. The mentors of the program are its genetic essence passed down to the next generation. Even in a colossus government organization like NASA, we also had a well-designed mentorship program. It taught mentorship and the basics of the process of passing down our heritage, while the memories and the history lived in still-beating hearts who drove into the office each day to share with the next generation of new NASA-reens. The modern Templars are no different. In NASA…

The meeting was running long – but no one was surprised. It was, after all, a government meeting of NASA engineering staff at the Kennedy Space Center, and these routinely ran overtime. Yet this particular confab was way overdue for someone with any recognizable authority (if they had any feelings left in their legs) to finally stand up and put a merciful end to our collective misery. It was mind-numbingly late in real physiological terms – way, way beyond any normal human’s attention span. And then some attention-seeking supervisor-wannabe stood up and asked something no one should ever, ever inquire…

I designed and supervised a contractor-build of the NASA undersea research habitat, the Scott Carpenter Space Analog Station, known as the Carpenter Station. One of the perks of being the Aquanaut Mission Commander on a NASA undersea mission was that I was able to hand-select my Executive Officer. There was no question who I would select: the military-trained, professional, and most competent aquanaut on the planet – Claudia Chaberland. Claudia was already a NASA subcontractor, so the choice was easy. The Carpenter Station was an ambient pressure habitat, meaning it featured an always-open bottom hatch called a “moonpool.” The pressure…

Geologists have evidence that 32,000 years ago, on the western edge of the Hawaiian Island of Oahu, a relatively small volcano whose west-facing wall lay alongside the Atlantic Ocean, experienced a major underwater fissure along an undersea flank. Perhaps caused by a minor magmatic tremor, it allowed countless thousands of gallons of cool seawater to suddenly pour into a complex labyrinthine network of volcanic lava tubes already heated to hundreds of degrees by the underground chambers of liquid rock. The sudden flash of steam in the enclosed geologic formation exploded with such violence that the entire western wall of the…

The ongoing war in the Holy Land was prompted exclusively by Hamas terrorists’ violent invasion and targeting of Jewish civilians on 7 October 2023. The wholly justified counterattack by the Israeli Defense Forces has never been the subject of any valid rational criticism. Throughout the history of humanity, any nation has the unalienable right to self-defense and the security of its people. But in the months following October 2023, the IDF military focus of ridding the Gaza Strip of Hamas terrorists has become progressively ambiguous and has since devolved into a moral catastrophe of historic magnitude for Israel and the…