As sometimes happens the heart and tongue trip over themselves.

My previous blog made a plea for a resolution to the General Convention on the preemptive use of nuclear weapons. I was again' it. It turns out, in reading the report of Standing Commission on Anglican and International Peace with Justice Concerns, the Commission was too. The Commission reported to the Executive Council and EC then passed a resolution “No Preemptive Use of Nuclear Weapons” in October 2005.

So I am withdrawing the resolution. No need to repeat what was just done, I suppose. That resolution is available for those who dig a bit... it is HERE.

Reading Publication 3-12 of the Doctrine for Joint nuclear Operations, which is attached to that resolution, ought to scare the hell out of us all. Thanks to those who did this good work.

I learned several good things in this little exercise in reaching where the heart took me, two very positive and one a puzzle:

(i) We are blessed with good people often speaking the truth with clarity, and in particular with a very fine group on the Standing Commission on Anglican and International Peace with Justice Concerns, a Standing Commission of the General Convention.

(ii) Research is good. It perhaps will help in the tripping.

(iii) I published this on my blog and also on the House of Bishops/ House of Deputies list. I received not one offer to sign on with me on this, not one note directing me to what had already been done, and on the blog several suggestions that what I wrote didn't go far enough and several that said that I might well mind my own very small business, but mostly there is silence (certainly on the HoB/D list). And silence in this noisy world is odd indeed.

I take the work of others, the need to search and keep on searching and silence as things to be treasured. Not always liked, but treasured.

Still, it is too bad that in the whole of the "A" resolutions (those presented by the Standing Commissions of the General Convention and are published prior to Convention) the word WAR only appears once... and that in a footnote on a book about Civil Rights.

What is too bad about this is that there is no indication as yet that the General Convention (as opposed to its Standing Commissions) is in any way itself speaking in the present on one of the primary characteristics of this time . That there is as yet (until we see the other resolutions) no word in Convention on the spiritual and social debilitation that comes from unending war is odd, and if we actually get through General Convention without some voice on the matter, shame on us.