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Is William Wilberforce your ancestor? What does it mean to be an evangelical? Decade after decade new declarations and explanations emerge, and some are mouthfuls of mush. But the latest, titled "An Evangelical Manifesto: The Washington Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment," scheduled for unveiling on May 7 by a group including Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and leading lights Rick Warren, Os Guinness, Dallas Willard, Timothy George, and Richard Mouw, is likely to do some good. Although "manifesto" is an arrogant-sounding word, this one's confessions are credible, its hopes holistic, and its goals generous....

Victor Victorians. A Lesson in Real Morality March 18, 2007 BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist 'William Wilberforce,'' writes Eric Metaxas in Amazing Grace, "was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that's ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again -- and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.'' What did Wilberforce ''cure''? Two centuries ago, on March 25, 1807, one very persistent British backbencher secured the...

Editor's Note:  The following letter by Fr Gerard Wilberforce, a Catholic priest in Exeter, who is the great grandson of the famed William Wilberforce is reproduced with the permission of Independent Catholic News.By Fr. Gerard WilberforceMarch 31, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - I am writing as the great great grandson of William Wilberforce, who campaigned vigorously for the ending of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, which ultimately paved the way for the abolition of slavery itself throughout the entire British Empire in 1833.I am often asked what would be the campaigns Wilberforce would be fighting if he were alive in...

Islam’s involvement in the black slave trade goes back over 14 centuries, back to its founder, Mohammed, who owned black slaves. Muslim slavers in North Africa also engaged in a red hot trade of white Christians. Read this fascinating, you-won’t-see-it-anywhere-else romp through reality by FSM Contributing Editor Adrian Morgan who explains what politically-correct history books conveniently ignore. (CAIR: care to apologize?) Should The Islamic World Apologize For Slavery? – Part One By Adrian Morgan For members of Britain's politically correct establishment, this week has been one of hand wringing and embarrassing gestures of self-abasement. On Saturday, March 24, a procession...

On a plantation just outside the Jamaican capital, Kingston, we watched workers with long machetes slice down towering stalks of sugar cane with industrial precision. Sugar is still harvested by hand, when it is too wet for machines The crop is only harvested by hand on modern plantations when it rains and today there is a steady drizzle. Usually machines do the graft. But for more than 300 years until the early 19th century the machines were African slaves. Men, women and children were overworked and brutalised. Cruelty and torture meant as many as a third of all slaves...

Quakers started the British campaign against the slave trade and invented modern campaigning, championing the petition and the consumer boycott, and mastering the use of images and logos. Not that they like to shout about it. It is perhaps the defining image of the battle to end the slave trade. Not a picture of a shackled slave, or some gruesome punishment, but a cross-section of a ship. It is a ship packed so full that the mind boggles at the sheer logistics of inhumanity. The engraving of the Brookes, fully-loaded, slave ship The use of the engraving of the...

From The Times February 26, 2007 Religion isn’t the sickness. It’s the cure Our correspondent on the moral failure of modernism Wlliam Rees-Mogg From the earliest days Christianity has been opposed to slavery. In his Letter to the Galatians, St Paul wrote: “As many of you that have been baptised in Christ, have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. We were all one in Jesus Christ.” Undoubtedly Christians have compromised with slavery — as with other social evils — in the course of history, but...

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.� Whether Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, nearly every American Christian knows John Newton’s beautiful hymn, “Amazing Grace.� Believers have sung it for more than 200 years. Its words and melody speak to one of the deepest instincts of the human heart: the need for deliverance. Like St. Augustine before him, Newton discovered that “our hearts are restless until they rest in (God).� A former slave trader, Newton converted to Christianity during a storm on...

If you’ve seen the movie Crash, there is a scene where Anthony, a car thief played by the rapper Ludacris, discovers a van with the keys dangling in the driver’s door. Since no one is around, he hops in and drives to a chop shop to sell off the parts. When they open up the back of the van, Anthony and the white shop owner are startled to find a dozen Asian men, women, and children. In stunning immediacy, the shop owner offers Anthony $500 for each one without a tinge of reluctance—haggling for humans like used auto parts. As...

As Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, they might add to the list of things for which they are grateful: Christian evangelicals. No, I'm not kidding. It has become fashionable and amusing these days to ridicule conservative Christians who believe in the Bible, even if they fail to live by the Word every waking moment. One fallen preacher comes along and the secular world rejoices in the triumph of hypocrisy. Yet, anyone familiar with the history of social justice knows that evangelicals, as well as others of different faiths, have led many of the causes that progressives today claim as their turf. It...

Fact, Fable, and Darwin By Rodney Stark I write as neither a creationist nor a Darwinist, but as one who knows what is probably the most disreputable scientific secret of the past century: There is no plausible scientific theory of the origin of species! Darwin himself was not sure he had produced one, and for many decades every competent evolutionary biologist has known that he did not. Although the experts have kept quiet when true believers have sworn in court and before legislative bodies that Darwin's theory is proven beyond any possible doubt, that's not what reputable biologists, including committed...

Student gun sales armed N.J. gang, authorities sayAn indictment alleges collegians were used to funnel dozens of weapons from an Ohio store to Newark.By Troy GrahamInquirer Staff Writer   Federal prosecutors in New Jersey have indicted the owner of an Ohio gun store and three members of a violent Newark street gang in the first gun-trafficking case of its kind.The merchant sold guns to intermediaries, all of them students or former students at Wilberforce University, a small private school in Ohio. The students then funneled the guns to the Double ii Bloods street gang, authorities said.The case, which will...

Wilberforce Manifesto of Rt.3 Peg's Bottom saw his own reflection in his barnyard water trough in early August, and since his eyesight isn't what it used to be, didn't recognize himself and thought he was about to be kidnapped by an extra terrestial and taken into a space ship and experimented on.It was, under the circumstances, a logical conclusion since being the world's only cross-eyed catcher, when he plays the Brothers and Sisters of the Perambulating Orient Lodge softball team, he misses most of the incoming balls so he has two black eyes, no front teeth and a nose best...