Tony Blair Faith Foundation

This summer, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation hosted an intensive academic summer course examining human rights and religious minorities with McGill University. The two week course held in Montreal, Canada brought together Faith and Globalisation Initiative students from partner universities around the world. The below blog is from, Zeng Qifei, one of the students who attended the course. You can read more blogs from the summer course here.  I'm a Chinese, an analytic college student, and a convinced atheist.

This summer, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation hosted an intensive academic summer course examining human rights and religious minorities with McGill University. The two week course held in Montreal, Canada brought together Faith and Globalisation Initiative students from partner universities around the world. The below blog is from, Marina Cordova, one of the students who attended the course. You can read more blogs from the summer course here.  Today, Mexico is secular by law and mostly catholic by tradition.

This summer, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation hosted an intensive academic summer course examining human rights and religious minorities with McGill University. The two week course held in Montreal, Canada brought together Faith and Globalisation Initiative students from partner universities around the world. The below blog is from, Tessa Brown, one of the students who attended the course.

This summer, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation hosted an intensive academic summer course examining human rights and religious minorities with McGill University. The two week course held in Montreal, Canada brought together Faith and Globalisation Initiative students from partner universities around the world. The below blogs are from students who attended the course and were asked to write about religion, secularism and public life in their particular parts of the world.

As part of our blog series, Perspectives: Religion and Public Life, Tinci Singh examines the difficulties for Sikhs when it comes to the exercise of their religion in the public sphere. Perspectives: Religion and Public Life is a series of short blogs on questions about the relationship between religion and secularism, you can find the rest of the series by clicking here. Not so long ago, I attended a conference of the European Network on Religion and Belief in Brussels.

As part of our blog series: Perspectives: Religion and Public Life, Dr. Nandini Chatterjee examines India’s interesting case of modern state practices where the regulation of religion is concerned. Perspectives: Religion and Public Life is a series of short blogs on questions about the relationship between religion and secularism, you can find the rest of the series by clicking here. To western and non-western observers, India has long been synonymous with pervasive and exotic religiosity.

We have become accustomed to the popular notion of “culture wars” with religious and secular worldviews presented as the principal belligerents. But is such a polarised vision of the world really justified?

With the Faith Foundation now in its fifth year, it was a particular pleasure for me to see Kosovo formally adopt our schools and universities programmes. It is an extraordinary country, smaller than Northern Ireland but with much the same population, and filled with a similarly attractive optimism and hope.

Proselytism is one of the neuralgic areas in relations between different faiths. It has certainly become one of the major secular objections to the practice of religion. But the reality is very often different from the assumptions and fears of those wishing to find a stick to beat the faith communities. To begin with only a tiny proportion of people of faith are engaged in what is normally meant by proselytism: coercive or manipulative attempts to get people to join their faith community and adopt their set of beliefs and practises.

Human Trafficking is the sale, transport and profit from people who are forced to work for others against their will. This trade is the world’s fastest growing crime. In December 2010, Sixth Formers from Loreto Grammar School received a visit from a local Church member as part of their General RE programme; they were introduced to the subject of Human Trafficking. The talk brought the issue close to home as they told of the human trafficking which is taking place in their home city of Manchester.