"The Tony Blair Faith Foundation will organise a global campaign to
mobilise young people, across religious divides, to work together towards achieving the
Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs). ... Tony Blair said that he is passionate about the importance of faith in the modern world and highlight the need for people of faith to reach out to one another.
The foundation... will promote understanding between the major faiths, and increase understanding of the role of faith in the modern world. The foundation will work with
Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists.
"The foundation is inspired by the former Prime Minister’s belief that
faith can be a progressive force, advancing humanity and ending global poverty. The Foundation will bring people of faith together to deliver the Millennium Development Goals. Tony Blair believes that the capacity of faith organisations to do good is immense – and their reach is unparalleled."
--
Millennium Development Goals are litmus test of world’s values
“The issue of
religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st Century
as political ideology was to the 20th Century. In an era of
globalisation, there is nothing more important than getting people
of different faiths and therefore cultures to understand each other
better and live in peace and mutual respect; and to give faith
itself its proper place in the future.” —Tony
Blair
"The purpose of the Tony
Blair Faith Foundation is to promote respect, friendship and understanding
between the major religious faiths; and to make the case for faith itself as
relevant, positive and a force for good in the modern world."
--
The Tony Blair Faith
Foundation
"Yale President Richard C. Levin 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.'...
"Blair, who served as British prime minister from
1997 to 2007, has been mentioned as a possible
president of the
European Union
and earlier in 2008 it was announced Blair would
become a part-time
advisor to the US-based bank
JPMorganChase....Yale
has strong ties to US political leaders: both President George W. Bush and his father,
former president George H. W. Bush, were Yale undergraduates."
--
Tony Blair accepts Yale
position on faith and globalisation
[See
Bush, Beliefs, and elusive Bonesmen]
Tony Blair: "...religious faith,
crucial to so many people’s culture
and identity, can play a
positive or a negative role. Either positively
it will encourage peaceful co-existence by people of faith coming
together in respect, understanding and
tolerance, retaining
their distinctive identity but living happily with those who do
not share that identity. Or it will work against such co-existence
by defining people by difference, those of one faith in opposition
to others of a different faith. In this context,
inter-faith action and
encounter are vital.
"...religious
faith...has a major part to play in shaping the values which
guide the modern world,
and can and should be a
force for progress.
But it has to be rescued on the one hand from the extremist and
exclusionary tendency within religion today....
"Faith as a means of exclusion. God
in this connection becomes not universal but partisan....An adjunct
to such a form of religious faith is a refusal to countenance scientific
discovery if it appears inconvenient to an aspect of organised religion.
...
"Mass
migration is changing communities,
even countries. People communicate ideas and images instantly
around the world, creating immediate political and ideological
movements in a ferment of quickly devoured information....Faiths
can transform and humanise the impersonal
forces of globalisation, and shape the values of the changing set
of economic and power relationships of the early 21st Century. This
is one of the issues I’ll explore in a Faith and Globalisation course
which I am starting with Yale University later this year...
"...the
centre of gravity, economically and politically, is
shifting East.
... China and India together, will industrialise the bulk of their
populations, presently employed in subsistence agriculture, probably
within two decades.....It is one reason why a sensible long-term
partnership with China, and of course with India, is of vital strategic
importance to us....
"In
her remarkable book ‘The Great Transformation’ Karen
Armstrong traces the evolution of religious thought from the
earliest times, both East and West, when religion did indeed
seem often cruel, unforgiving and irrational, to the modern
times in which the faiths
share many common values
and much common purpose.....
"The
foundation will concentrate on certain key specifics. The first
will be to help the different faith organisations to work together
in furtherance of the Millennium Development Goals, which I helped
advocate as PM and which are, in many ways the litmus test of the
world’s values.... The second will be to produce high quality material
– books, websites, every means of communication – to
educate people better about the different
faiths, what they truly believe
not what we often mistakenly think they believe....
"If people of different faiths can co-exist happily, in
mutual respect and
solidarity, so can our world. And if faith takes its proper place in our
lives, then we can live with a purpose beyond ourselves alone, supporting
humanity on its journey to fulfillment.
"
--
Faith and
Globalisation
Faith and Globalisation:
"The links between the religious, economic
and political forces shaping our world are too rarely explored or explained. The
Tony Blair Faith Foundation intends to help put this right. The Foundation will
work with some of the world's most respected scholars and leaders to develop a deep
understanding of how politics, economics and faith can come together in the 21st
century for the good of humanity."
