Friends Journal article: Speaking to Our Members’ Conditions
May 14, 2024 § 1 Comment
A Friends Journal article
My article on membership in the May issue of Friends Journal is currently featured on FJ's website:Speaking to Our Members’ Conditions: Giving Us Back to Ourselves.
You can also view a video FJ’s editor Martin Kelley recorded of his interview with me about the article here.
Through the Flaming Sword 
Hi Steve,
My impression when watching the interview is that I might be watching your father. Just a sense …
…and, in a different kind of sense, OMG! How hansome you are in gray! The angular featured sinewed visage wreathed in black and a flashing white of a smile is distinguished by the aging.
“Recording” is a vestigial concept in any spiritual sense … if the discernment of the scripture that by our fruits we are know, has any weight. Also, Yearly Meetings were of ministers and elders. Period. And of the recorded sort. Ministers and Elders are their own Meeting. The facing bench a deference to the gifts so recorded.
What that spiritual institution became is a spiritual bastardization of its function in a religious society as dead quaker money increasing became a cause for other business. And the separation of gender and meetings is a factor worth considering as a factor of what is missed in translation.
Being male, I long assumed the women’s meeting joined the men’s. Alternatively, money, inclusive of the dead quaker sort, transformed male spirituality and usurped the vertical, as the horizontal, or the female spirituality was enjoined by “men” …and the rest became herstory.
=)
Spirit’s aim astray, Quaker funds breed business greed, Lost tales in gender.
This haiku is a 10 second composition of ChatGPT and the last two paragraphs. I am calling this thing ITAIM (Information Technology Artificial Intelligencia Mathematicus). To my ear “in gender” is a pun for ‘engender”. Within CapitaismFAIL, this is what herstory has become: abrupt climate change.
You might also enjoy this ITAIM mashup with some, yet, human endeavors:
https://www.gumlet.com/watch/65d0b8207759c9daec1bad01 Set Anon as Seth gumlet.com
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