I am now reading William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity by Kevin Belmonte. This book is excellent so far. I read another biography of Wilberforce several years ago but was recently inspired yet again by Wilberforce’s life by the movie Amazing Grace which received a somewhat limited release nationwide this past February. I watched an early screening of the film at the Charlottesville Film Festival and saw it again when it was released in February. Walden Films did an outstanding job telling the story of Wilberforce's life (and his life's work) with the picture, and I intend to purchase the DVD when it is released in August.

If you are not familiar with the life of Wilberforce, I encourage you to read about him and the community of reformers that he lived with in Clapham, a suburb of London. Their example of working together to effect real change through legislation is quite the contrast to our late pathetic Republican majority in Congress which did absolutely nothing it set out to do. All the work that we did to elect a Republican Congress accomplished almost nothing except for a bloated federal government, compromise on almost every front with the Democratic party, and the promotion of Ted Kennedy’s legislative packages on everything from education to immigration. If you are tired of Republican legislators who run on a platform of reform and then are too afraid to wield their majority, read about Wilberforce. It will make you realize there is an alternative to merely the accumulation and maintenance of power, which seemed to be the only waking obsession of Hastert and his buddies.