What does Wilberforce have to say to us? |
by Gina Dalfonzo |
In this week of celebrating William Wilberforce and his legacy, Mark Earley's BreakPoint commentary today serves as a reminder not to get so caught up in the heroes of the past that we forget about our own responsibilities in the present. In fact, if we truly want to honor Wilberforce and others like him, our attitude should be quite the contrary:
In this Information Age, our problem today is not the kind of “invisibility” Wilberforce combated—people who care about human dignity can easily find out what they need to know. The trick is getting them to care in the first place.
It’s making our voices and concerns heard above what many call the “clutter” of the Information Age. When thousands of things, most of them worthless, compete for people’s attention, we need to help people focus on the right things. We need to remind them that there are things more deserving of their attention than who entered rehab and who fathered whose baby.
Just as Wilberforce became the conscience of his age, we must become the conscience of the Information Age. It will not make us popular, any more than Wilberforce’s persistence endeared him to his peers.
But if we do not try to get people to look at the larger world, then today’s victims of brutality might as well be invisible.
Over at CultureBeat, Jim Dahlman talks about how some churches have already started using the Wilberforce tributes "to get people to look at the larger world":
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