Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain, will serve a one year fellowship appointment at Yale University where he will be helping lead a course of study on faith and globalization.
According to the Ecumenical News Service,
“Blair will serve as the Howland Distinguished Fellow during the 2008-09 academic year, the university announced on 7 March. Blair will work with the faculties of the Yale Divinity School and the Yale School of Management.
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.’
Concurrent with his Yale position, Blair – who was an Anglican but in 2007 converted to Roman Catholicism – is expected to launch later in 2008, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. This ‘will promote understanding between the major faiths and increase understanding of the role of faith in the modern world’, the university, based at New Haven, Connecticut, said in its announcement.
The appointment was not lauded by all however. Ian Gibson, a former MP who served in the Commons during Blair’s time as prime minster said of the news:
‘It is a pity that Mr Blair did not think more deeply about issues of religious strife before he went and bombed Baghdad,’ Gibson told the London-based Guardian newspaper in 2007. ‘Now he wants to be vicar to the world? It is ridiculous.'”
Read the rest here.