eUpdate #1

Hi Guild fans;

A few important updates for are in line, so bear with me. First and foremost, we offer our congratulations to Kyle and Jessica Caldwell for their new daughter, Eden Evangeline! Zach and Laurel Cornelius are also counting the days until they welcome their own new addition into the world. A favorite theologian of mine has said that children themselves are acts of hope, that we trust the world will improve, that maybe young ones will inspire us to act to improve the one we have!

On another front, we are all very excited about the upcoming Truth Commission on Conscience in War (TCCW) and encourage all of you to check out their website (www.conscienceinwar.org) to learn more about this significant event. The Guild is proud to be a co-sponsor of this event and we are currently working on inviting a commissioner as a part of that collaboration. Kyle and I will both be in attendance as representatives of the Guild; Kyle will possibly live-blogging and I will be offering testimony from my own CO experience. Furthermore, I am also very honored to be a part of a group of students compiling academic material to support the work of the Commission and authoring the final report, which will be published later this year on Martinmas (AKA Veterans Day). To help Kyle and I get to New York in March, please consider donating to the Guild. Instructions on how to do that are on the lower left corner of our website, and donations are tax deductible through our generous sponsor, The Simple Way of Philadelphia.

Because of the enormous effort we are putting into this commission, we will not be publishing our seasonal newsletter, Change of Command, on time. Do please check out our last two issues, which are available for viewing and download athttp://bit.ly/cFtGtC and http://bit.ly/bvF0Lk. On other media fronts, we are also going to be migrating our website onto Wordpress software and hopefully doing a lot of work on it just prior to the TCCW. Expect us to be blogging finally, as well as trying to compile theological and legal resources (articles, links, videos, books, etc.) for service members and their families who are struggling with their participation in war as people of faith.

Surprisingly, we are going strong on Facebook and have been doing a bit of linking and status-ing, so for now this is the best place to keep up to speed with us. Please invite friends to be fans of ours and consider following the Purse at www.causes.com/centurionspurse. I promise we will soon explain in more detail the direction we want to take with this. It has been calmly collecting dust in the back burner, but in the next issue of Change of Command, we plan on getting more serious about advancing this area of our community work.

Finally, we are thinking very seriously about welcoming members into the Guild (we’ve been thinking of calling them “Centurions”), and we are looking for feedback on what YOU think that could look like. We are definitely going to have a Centurion Auxiliary Corps, like CPT Reservists or something, but we wanted to hear from our ‘fans’ about what that might entail. Expect us to be contacting some of you one on one or via email to hear from you directly.

Thats about enough for now. Thank you SO much for reading this far, I will try to keep these updates much shorter from here on out…

Dutifully,

- Logan
Executive Officer, Centurion’s Guild