Remembering G Jamie Dedes
Our Beloved Founding Editor
The BeZine Editors
Introduction to Beguine Again
& The Bardo Group — Founders of The BeZine
We were a consolidation of two collaboratives with shared core values of peace, sustainability, social justice, and a life of the spirit.
At Beguine Again, an interfaith effort founded by Terri Stewart, a pastor in the United Methodist tradition who is the Steward of Connection at Circle Faith Future (CFF). (The vision of CFF is building hope in a fractured world.) On Beguine Again, you found meditations, spiritual practice and inspirational posts. Beguine Again sought to encourage, inspire and transform through personal spiritual experience.
The Bardo Group (now The Bardo Group Beguines) was founded by poet and writer, Jamie Dedes, and consists of writers, poets, story-tellers, artists, photographers, musicians, clerics and spiritual teachers from the world over.
The Bardo Group Beguines was pleased to present The BeZine, a quarterly eZine. The people who visited here to read, “Like,” and comment were as integral to this community as were the Core Team and guest contributors. Visitors continue to lend their energy, support, imagination and insights to the results of this effort. Comments are open—kindly expressed perspectives, suggestions, and dialogue remain welcome.
MISSION STATEMENT
The BeZine’s mission was to foster proximity and understanding through our shared love of the arts and humanities and all things spirited and to make—however modest—a contribution toward personal healing and deference for the diverse ways people try to make moral, spiritual and intellectual sense of a world in which illness, violence, despair, loneliness and death are as prevalent as compassion, hope, friendship, reason and birth.
The BeZine’s foundations were sacred space (common ground) and social activism, as expressed through the arts. The BeZine focused on four themes after a few years—
- Growing SustainABILITY
- Creating Peace
- Building Social Justice
- Living Activism and Spirit
and two additonal sections—
- Best Practices related to our foundations and themes
- BeATTITUDES — work that fit the mission and values of The BeZine but either was not directly related to a specific focus-theme or was related to more than one theme.
—from a range of affirming perspectives expressed respectfully primarily through literature—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction; the arts—music, visual art, videos, photography; and occasional articles, interviews, or reviews.
VALUES
We published work here representative of shared human values, however differently those values might be expressed in our various religions and cultures. We feel that our art and our Internet-facilitated social connection offer a means to see one another in our full humanity, as brothers and sisters, and not as “Others.”
This Still is a space where we hope you’ll delight in learning how much you have in common with “other” peoples. We hope that your visits here, exploring our nearly ten-year publication life—will help US All to respect rather than to fear our fellow humans.
We acknowledge the enormous theological differences and historical resentments that carve wedges among and within traditions, ethnic and national groups, but we believe that ultimately self-preservation, common sense, and human solidarity will yet empower connections and collaboration to overcome division and disorder.
We continue to ply our art, meditations, activism, and prayer toward that tipping point when compromise—an admittedly imperfect peace—will overcome war, and respect for life will topple resentment—with these steps happening in a spirit of collaboration and mutual caring. That may not happen in our time, but it has to start somewhere and sometime. The BeZine was our modest contribution toward a goal for which diverse people the world over work and pray.
COPYRIGHT: 2011-2024, all rights reserved. Please do not print or post material from this site without asking permission of the author or authors. Leave your request in the comments section under the poem or feature and the author will get back to you. Thank you!
The BeZine was a volunteer effort, a gift of love.
On behalf of The Bardo Group Beguines and
in the spirit of peace, love (respect) and community,
Jamie Dedes
Founding and Managing Editor, The BeZine
This was originally written, edited, and updated over time by our beloved founding editor of blessed memory, Jamie Dedes, who left this world near the end of 2020. The current editors of The BeZine continued to edit and update as The BeZine continued its mission, and now, as we close this chapter—but we leave Jamie’s signature as her founding mission always was the keystone for all we did at The BeZine.
—The BeZine Editors
Remembering Jamie
Contact Us
The Bardo Group/Bequine Again Facebook Page
Update: January 25, 2024
The BeZine 
87 thoughts on “About The BeZine”
Comments are closed.