TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Tony Blair

Faith matters. Even if you are not of religious faith yourself. Over 4 billion people world-wide recognize themselves as religious. They may not attend an organized place of worship. But Faith plays a part in their lives. A recent poll found that religion is important for around 30-35% of people in Europe, 65% of Americans and for about 90% of people in most Muslim-majority countries.

I started the Tony Blair Faith Foundation because I believe the modern world cannot work unless people from different faiths and cultures learn to live in peaceful co-existence with each other. Understanding increases the possibility of peace. Ignorance increases the potential for division.

The reason this is so important today is that globalization is shrinking the space we live in, making us share it, pushing people together in a way that is unique in human history. Some dislike this process. Some, like me, are content and even welcome it. But, for sure, it is a fact.

In this world, if religious faith becomes a counter force to this process, one which pulls people apart, then it becomes reactionary and divisive. So if I define myself as a Christian in opposition to you as a Muslim, then just as we are forced to live together by globalization, so we are forced apart by a view of religious faith that is exclusionary and hostile to those of a different faith to our own.

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Labels: faith, globalization, tolerance, Tony Blair, Tony Blair Faith Foundation

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Friday, January 23, 2009

Programs Aim To Increase Study and Research on Faith and Globalization

Friday, January 16, 2009

New Haven, Conn. — In December, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he would expand the Tony Blair Faith Foundation (TBFF) and the Yale Initiative on Faith and Globalization over the next two years.

Future plans include:

• Basing the U.S. operations of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation at Yale University, employing a small team of staff to work across the range of the foundation’s programs and help extend its reach across North America.

• Building a global consortium of universities that will introduce courses on Faith & Globalization and join the conversation worldwide. Initially this will include major universities in Europe and Asia.

• Working with major polling partners to better understand the attitudes of people worldwide to religion and globalization; and develop an annual international student survey, building on the exploratory work done by the Global 21 student network this year.

• Expanding the website created in conjunction with Yale’s Faith and Globalization course to become the go-to site for the issues of faith and globalization. Drawing on the resource materials collected for the course, as well as interviews and comments by the lecturers and guest participants, the TBFF will produce materials for professors.

• Expanding research collaborations, which Blair describes as "one of the most exciting opportunities for our work with Yale" Toward this end, the Divinity School will co-sponsor several research projects involving the role of "spiritual capital" in global economy, notions of global common good, and Muslim and Christian relations.

• Producing a major book on faith and globalization, and exploring the creation of other publications that can bring these questions to a wider public audience.

• Establishing an international summer internship for students with exchanges between Yale and the TBFF’s offices in London, to engage in collaborative projects both intellectual and practical, which advance our joint agenda.

• Hosting a forum at Yale in 2010 and 2012 for Muslims and Christians, which will allow leaders of these two communities to build on and deepen the impact of the Common Word engagements begun at Yale in the summer of 2008. From 2010 onwards, the forum and dialogue will increase Jewish participation.

• Developing a set of seminars and workshops worldwide that will engage business and policy leaders during the next two years. This will include a high-level international conference of business leaders at Yale next fall that Blair will host with President Richard C. Levin.

• Organizing more joint-teaching sessions by video-conference (such as the one between Yale and the National University of Singapore, held in the fall) with other universities as they take up the Faith and Globalization course to bring a global perspective to the examination of these issues.

• Tackling new areas of research, such as religion, conflict and reconciliation; how religion adapts to globalization; and how globalization can be infused with a stronger sense of values.

• Building on the current collaboration between the Divinity School and the School of Management to increase the cross-disciplinary input to our work and bring expertise from other schools.

Labels: faith, globalization, religion, Tony Blair, Tony Blair Faith Foundation, Yale Initiative on Faith and Globalization

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Saturday, June 14, 2008

In religion, ignorance is not necessarily bliss

Dennis Roberts
Published: June 13, 2008

Some of us may chuckle when we read about a poll or survey that indicates how Americans seem to know very little about religion.

We hear that 10 percent of Americans think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife or Moses went to Mount Cyanide to get the 10 Commandments (which, of course, most cannot name) or the epistles were the wives of the apostles or that most Americans cannot name the first book of the Bible.

Religious illiteracy makes it difficult for many – if not most – Americans to make sense of a world in which some people kill and others seek to make peace in the name of religion. This lack of basic religious knowledge – reaching even into the higher, policy-making echelons of our federal government – makes it all the easier for the general population to be swayed by demagogic voices. Certainly, since the tragic events of Sept. 11, circumstances in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and other global hot spots should have brought home to Americans the relevance of religion to world affairs, our need to be better informed and the importance of finding common ground for working together.

There is a glimmer of hope on the international horizon. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced recently the formation of The Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which is envisioned as a vehicle through which different religious faiths can work cooperatively to address some of the world’s pressing challenges. He has expressed a desire to rescue faith from the dual challenges of irrelevance and extremism. He wants to create an environment in which faith traditions can encounter one another “through action“ as well as dialogue.

Blair said in a New York speech, “Globalization is pushing people together. Interdependence is reality. Peaceful co-existence is essential. If faith becomes a countervailing force, pulling people apart, it becomes destructive and dangerous.
“If, by contrast, it becomes an instrument of peaceful co-existence, teaching people to live with difference, to treat diversity as a strength, to respect ‘the other,’ then faith becomes an important part of making the 21st century work. It enriches, it informs, it provides a common basis of values and belief for people to get along together.”

It is important that we, as Americans, work to increase our basic knowledge of the major religious traditions because a well-educated electorate is crucial, not only for our representative democracy, but for responsible world citizenship as well.
What are the sacred texts of other major world religions? Significant holidays? What are Islam’s Five Pillars, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism or the 10 Commandments? What are the sacraments for Roman Catholics? For Protestants?

It is also crucial that we move beyond knowledge and dialogue to action, working side by side to break down barriers in order to help a world in need. Tony Blair may be a player on the world stage, but each of us has a role to play here in our local communities, our Commonwealth and our nation. Will we be counted among the literate or the illiterate?

Labels: Dennis Roberts, Faith Foundation, religious illiteracy, Tony Blair

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Thursday, June 12, 2008

Religion Necessary to Survive Our Century

Published: June 03, 2008

Religion Necessary to Survive Our Century

By Krzys Wasilewski

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair unveiled last Saturday that uniting the world's three largest religions will be his lifetime goal. Blair, who once said that God would be his judge on Iraq, launched a foundation that will work towards the peaceful coexistence of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Although while premier Tony Blair urged British politicians not to perform American-style "chest beating," now he wants religion to play a leading role in the 21st century. At the opening conference of his new foundation, Blair admitted that "Religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st Century as political ideology was to the 20th Century."

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation was launched on May 30, 2008, in New York City. The invited guests, among who was Former US President Bill Clinton, heard Blair saying that "the world [was] going tumultuous change" and, to address new issues, world leaders would have to discover a set of rules which could guide them in their efforts. According to the former British prime minister, religion is the answer.

Goals that Blair set up for his foundation may, in his own words, "sound impossibly idealistic," but after greater scrutiny are achievable. The foundation's website lists the three most important points: to promote respect and understanding between the major religions; to make the case for faith as a force for good; and to encourage inter-faith initiatives to tackle global poverty and conflict.

Faith is so important, says Blair, because the contemporary world brings distant communities closer than in the previous centuries. "Here is the crucial point. Globalization is pushing people together. Interdependence is reality. Peaceful co-existence is essential. If faith becomes a countervailing force, pulling people apart, it becomes destructive and dangerous," said the former British prime minister.

According to the data provided by Blair, Christians and Muslims know very little about each other. "Most Christians want better relations between Christianity and Islam but believe most Muslims don't," said Blair. The British leader underlined that in a recent survey; only 40 percent of Europeans said that religion was an important part of their lives. In the US, this number rose to 70 percent whereas in Muslim countries it exceeded 80 percent.

Blair hopes that his foundation will show how faith can help solve materialistic problems that plague the contemporary world. Religion, says the British statesman, can join people of different denominations in one common effort towards the better future.

Krzys Wasilewski is a NewsBlaze journalist, particularly interested in history and literature that expands his love of travel and historical curiosity.If you have any comments or suggestions, please write to: krzys.wasilewski@yahoo.com.

Labels: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Krzys Wasilewski, Tony Blair