By Bill Galvin

On March 21 and 22, approximately 500 people gathered in the sanctuary of the historic Riverside Church for the public hearing portion of the Truth Commission on Conscience & War. Celeste Zappala, one of the founders of Gold Star Families Speak Out, spoke of her son’s death in Iraq and the impact it had on her family and community. Tyler Boudreau, a former Marine Captain and Iraq war veteran, observed that many combatants have to believe, “the action they were part of must have been justified, or else there’s something wrong with what I did, and that’s too hard to bear.” And the ever engaging Josh Casteel, Army CO and former Abu Ghraib interrogator, observed, “There is no such thing as a private conscience. Conscience is inherently public and political.” Some of the testimony was in the form of excerpts from the movie Soldiers of Conscience.

After a year of negotiations, the US and Russia signed a new treaty to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles in both countries and make the world that much safer.

A supermajority of 67 senators is needed to ratify the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START).

Click here to send a message to your senator

The sensational video "Collatoral Murder" has been circulating widely online, showing U.S. troops in Iraq firing on civilians. Josh Stieber was a member of Bravo Company 2-16 and remembers the incident portrayed in the video.

If you call this a heartless murder, I think that you’re being overly self-righteous. If you question the very nature of the machines that we trap ourselves in and our goals for doing so, then we can learn something from this video.

A post by Elizabeth Palmberg today on the Sojourners blog underscores why our current delegation is in Colombia and why the Presbyterian Church in Colombia, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship are engaged in the Colombia Accompaniment Program.

Click here to read the full post

The PPF acknowledges this grassroots movement that shares our goal of engaging all people everywhere to support a world free of nuclear weapons and the steps needed to get there. We encourage you to join the movement.

A Place to Call Home: Immigrants, Refugees, and Displaced Peoples

http://advocacydays.org/

Worship, study and dialogue with hundreds of people of faith at the annual Ecumenical Advocacy Days. Then join us as we go to Capitol Hill to advocate for our members of Congress to remedy these global injustices. The 2010 conference will be held March 19 – 22 at the DoubleTree Hotel in Crystal City, Virginia just outside Washington, D.C.

You are invited to travel on a mission trip to Lebanon and Syria this fall to meet fellow-Presbyterians from Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. This venture is organized through the Iraq Partnership Network and the Syria-Lebanon Network of the PC(USA) and is sponsored and facilitated by The Outreach Foundation. The church governing bodies in the region, namely the Assembly of Presbyterian Churches in Iraq and the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon have worked closely with the networks to finalize and bless these plans.

an experiential conference on border issues confronting the church and the world…

If you're not able to attend the Convocation of Peacemakers on the east coast, you may want to consider this conference in the southwest.