Blair launches Faith Foundation

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has launched a Faith Foundation on Friday with the aim of improving understanding between different religions and fighting global poverty by mobilising people through faith.
"Religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st century as political ideology was to the 20th century," Blair said in a statement before Friday's launch in New York.
"In an era of globalisation, there is nothing more important than getting people of different faiths and cultures to understand each other better and live in peace and mutual respect," he said.
Blair, who converted to Catholicism in December after stepping down as prime minister in June, was often reticent about his faith during his 10 years in power in Britain, where religion and politics rarely mix.

Time magazine, which published an interview with Blair on Thursday, said the foundation aimed to build up a "war chest" of several hundred million dollars to fund projects to fight global poverty, such as an anti-malaria campaign.
It aims to support the UN Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets adopted by world leaders in 2000 to reduce hunger and halve extreme poverty.
"Tony Blair has argued that faith has to be rescued from those who would use it to divide and those determined to write it off as an irrelevance," the statement from his office said.
"By stressing the values of respect, justice and compassion which the great religions hold in common, he believes faith can help unite the world and shape its direction for the better."
It said in the first three years of the Foundation, priority would be given to encouraging inter-faith initiatives to tackle global poverty and to improve understanding of the great religions through education at every level.
Blair, whose wife and four children are Catholic, converted from Britain's established church, Anglicanism, to Roman Catholicism, in December. He held private talks with Pope Benedict at the Vatican last year.
In a BBC documentary last year he spoke about the importance of his faith, adding that while politicians could speak about religious faith in the United States, it was difficult to do so in Britain because "frankly people do think you are a nutter (crazy)".
Blair, a part-time international envoy for Palestinian economic development, is due to start teaching at Yale University in Connecticut in September, leading a course on "faith and globalisation".

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Blair wants bigger role for religion in government!

Former prime minister Tony Blair has called for faith to be given a central role in tackling the world's problems.
Mr Blair said faith should be rescued from extremism and be a force for progress, in his first speech on faith since becoming a Catholic.
He said politicians found it difficult to talk about faith because they "may be considered weird".
His speech was accompanied by a noisy anti-war protest and silent vigil by Catholic peace group Pax Christi.
Mr Blair, who converted to Catholicism months after stepping down as prime minister last summer and is now a Middle East envoy, told an audience of 1,600 at Westminster Cathedral he was often asked if faith was important to his politics.
"If you are someone 'of faith' it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn't affect your politics," he said.
'Packet of trouble'
But he said he had "no claims to moral superiority" and, referring to his former press secretary Alastair Campbell's famous remark while he was PM that "we don't do God", Mr Blair said it was "always a packet of trouble to talk about it".
He said for politicians to admit to having faith "leads to a whole series of suppositions".
These ranged from being "considered weird" to people assuming "that your religion makes you act, as a leader, at the promptings of an inscrutable deity" or that politicians desire to impose their faith on others.
Mr Blair said religion was not in decline and acts of terrorism had highlighted the fact that "we ignore the power of religion at our peril".
"Religious faith is a good thing in itself that so far from being a reactionary force - it is a major part to play in shaping values which guide the modern world and can and should be a force for progress," he said.
"But it has to be rescued on the one hand from the extremist and exclusionist tendency within religion today."
Faith Foundation
He said religious faith was most obviously associated with extremism in the name of Islam, but there were extremists in "virtually every religion" and those who used "their faith as a means of excluding the other person who does not share it".
He said his Faith Foundation, to be launched later this year, would bring together different faiths to promote religion as a force for good.
In a question and answer session later, Mr Blair was asked if he would have done anything differently in the light of the fact that he recently converted to Catholicism.
He said: "There is nothing I look back on now and say that as a result of my religious journey I would have done things very differently but that is expressly not to say that I got everything right."
Outside the cathedral a crowd of protesters blew whistles and made noise, saying they wanted to hold Mr Blair to account over his role.
Organisers of the demonstration said they were not attacking Mr Blair's freedom of speech, but his right to be treated as a pillar of respectability.
The Catholic peace group Pax Christi also held a silent vigil before the noisy protest.
Among them was former Iraq hostage Norman Kember, who said: "What happened to me was a minor blip in my life compared to the continuing plight of Iraq and the way ordinary Iraqi citizens have suffered so much.
"I feel it is partly Mr Blair's fault and I don't like the idea of him talking in a church. I feel what he did was un-Christian."
Terry Sanderson, of the National Secular Society, said: "Mr Blair's call for religion to play a bigger role in world affairs is like trying to douse a fire by showering it with petrol."

Tony Blair Teaching Religion?

Tony Blair is to teach students at Yale University in the US when he leads a seminar on faith and globalisation. The former prime minister has been appointed as a fellow at Yale and will begin teaching next year. The prestigious Connecticut university said the work was related to Mr Blair's Faith Foundation which will be launched later this year.
Mr Blair's other appointments have included as a Middle East envoy and an adviser to investment bank JP Morgan.

'Religious values'
Mr Blair has also left the Anglican Church to become a Roman Catholic since leaving office.
A statement said: "Yale University is pleased to announce the appointment of [former] Prime Minister Tony Blair as the Howland Distinguished Fellow for the next academic year.
Mr Blair has demonstrated outstanding leadership in these areas and is especially qualified to bring his perspective to bear

Richard C LevinYale president "Mr Blair will lead a seminar at Yale and participate in a number of events around the campus." Details of the course are being discussed with Yale's School of Management and Divinity. Yale president Richard C Levin said Mr Blair's appointment was a "tremendous opportunity" for the university. He said: "As the world continues to become increasingly inter-dependent, it is essential that we explore how religious values can be channelled toward reconciliation rather than polarisation. "Mr Blair has demonstrated outstanding leadership in these areas and is especially qualified to bring his perspective to bear."

"I tell you, Peter, before the rooster crows today, you will deny three times that you know me."

Tony Blair avoided talking about his religious views while in office for fear of being labelled "a nutter", the former prime minister has revealed. In an interview for BBC One's The Blair Years, he said that his faith had been "hugely important" to his premiership. His ex-spokesman Alastair Campbell once told reporters: "We don't do God." Mr Campbell has now acknowledged to the programme that his former boss "does do God in quite a big way", but that both men feared the public would be wary.

During the interview, Mr Blair said having faith was a crucial component for him in having the character to take on the prime minister's job. "For me having faith was an important part of being able to do that," he said. But while it was commonplace in the US and elsewhere for politicians to talk about their religious convictions, he added, "you talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you're a nutter". British voters imagined that leaders who were informed by religion would "commune with the man upstairs and then come back and say 'Right, I've been told the answer and that's it'". Mr Campbell's refusal to discuss his faith was not due to any opposition to his beliefs, but because "you always get into trouble talking about it", Mr Blair continued. Mr Campbell added that the former prime minister always asked his aides to find him a church to attend, wherever he happened to be, each Sunday. "Because he's pretty irreverent, he swears a fair bit, if he sees a very attractive woman his eye will wander and all that stuff, he doesn't look like your classic religious sort of guy," said Mr Campbell. But he added: "I think his close circle always understood that there was a part of him that was really, really important. "On that kind of spiritual level it did inform a lot of what he talked about, what he read... what he felt was important." Mr Campbell said the UK electorate were "a bit wary of politicians who go on about God". He had also been concerned that the Conservatives would accuse Labour of trying to claim faith as its own.

Peter Mandelson, a close confidant of Mr Blair, said: "He's not an exhibitionist when it comes to religion but deep inside him it is very, very important. "This is a man who takes a Bible with him wherever he goes and last thing at night he will read from the Bible." Sir Menzies Campbell, the former Liberal Democrat leader, suggested that Mr Blair may not have been so politically successful had the relationship between his beliefs and his actions in office been better known.
"The public might have been less willing to give him the triumph of three consecutive general election victories if they'd known the extent to which ethical values would overshadow pragmatism," Sir Menzies said.