A prominent social critic and longtime InterVarsity Press (IVP) author, Os Guinness was honored with the 38th annual William Wilberforce Award from The Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Wilberforce was a British politician whose work was born from his Christian faith and ultimately led to the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the 19th century. The award recognizes Guinness’s decades of helping Christians make sense of their calling in a post-Christian cultural moment.

“I think Guinness is in the tradition of Wilberforce, also of Francis Schaeffer and Chuck Colson, basically helping the Church think clearly about the moment by thinking about the past, and looking ahead toward the culmination of all things: the Kingdom,” John Stonestreet, who serves as president of The Colson Center, told The Christian Post.

Guinness is the author or editor of more than thirty books, including numerous IVP titles, such as The Dust of Death, Last Call for Liberty, Carpe Diem Redeemed, The Magna Carta of Humanity, Zero Hour America, Signals of Transcendence, Impossible People, Fool’s Talk, Renaissance, The Global Public Square, The Great Quest, and A Free People’s Suicide.

Al Hsu, who was editor for ten of Guinness’s IVP books, said, “We are grateful for the clarity and vision his many books have provided, and we congratulate him on this award commemorating his lifetime of Christian faith and service.”

Born in China to missionary parents, Guinness is the great-great-great-grandson of Arthur Guinness, the Dublin brewer. After witnessing the climax of the Chinese revolution in 1949, he was expelled with many other foreigners in 1951 and returned to England, where he was educated and served as a freelance reporter with the BBC. Since coming to the United States in 1984, he has been a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. He was the lead drafter of the Williamsburg Charter, celebrating the First Amendment, and has also been senior fellow at the EastWest Institute in New York, where he drafted the Charter for Religious Freedom. He also coauthored the public-school curriculum Living With Our Deepest Differences.

A sought-after speaker, Guinness has addressed audiences worldwide, from the British House of Commons to the United States Congress to the Saint Petersburg Parliament. He is a senior fellow at The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and was the founder of The Trinity Forum.

Guinness has had a lifelong passion to make sense of our extraordinary modern world and to stand between the worlds of scholarship and ordinary life, helping each to understand the other—particularly when advanced modern life touches on the profound issues of faith.

Hsu said, “For over half a century, Os Guinness has been an incisive Christian thinker, philosopher, apologist, social commentator, and champion of religious freedom. His perceptive insights have helped many engage the public square and discern their own sense of calling. It is particularly fitting for Os to be honored as an inheritor of William Wilberforce, not only because he has been a model of courage and conviction in public witness, but also because he has, like Wilberforce, encouraged many to pursue lives of faithful action in the times we live in, for the common good.”