Tony Blair Faith Foundation

My experience in London was scintillating. There were great causes that were being ploughed forward by volunteers dedicated to the betterment of people around the world. My film was a small piece of the larger movement that the Tony Blair Faith Foundation is leading; that movement is one towards peace and harmony. The Tony Blair Faith Foundation's Faith Shorts competition happened to me at a time when I was thinking about religion and faith very deeply, and very broadly. I had been motivated to read about a number of religions including the one I got by default – Hinduism.

PICTURE (Priests’ ICT Use in their Religious Experience) has studied the usages of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and of the internet in particular, by the priests of the Catholic Church all over the world. The research aims to offer a picture of which are the religious activities done by priests online, and which are their attitudes toward digital technologies.

I’ve been to a number of youth conferences before, but few were as fascinating and relevant as the Faith and Globalisation Student Conference: it was a real eye-opener. Given the complexity and seriousness of the issues concerning the place of religion in our globalised world, I think that the conference dealt with problems particularly pertinent today. With multiple attacks on places of worship, conflict between different religious communities, and the rise of extremist religious voices on the Internet, it’s easy to regard faith as part of the problem and not the solution.

In a traditional Chinese courtyard, surrounded by bamboo plants, the partnership between Peking University and the Tony Blair Faith Foundation was signed today by Tony Blair, PKU's Executive Vice President Prof Lin Jianhau, and myself. In fact the bamboo plants - what seemed to me, a first time visitor, as typically Chinese - are a luxury in Peking. The east of the country doesn't get enough water to sustain them naturally, so they are watered and nurtured at great expense in the ceremonial court.

On August 7 – 11, ten of the foremost Imams and Muslim leaders in the U.S. made an historic trip to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. The trip was led by Rabbi Jack Bemporad of the Center for Interreligious Understanding (NJ) and co-sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (Germany).

Lara Smallman was shortlisted in the Foundation's Faith Shorts Film Competition for her film The Laugh Judgment, which she made along with a Muslim and Christian, Hassan Ali and Jennifer Plummer, under the auspices of the Three Faiths Forum. The three-minute short explores how comedy can bring people of different faiths together and features interviews with comedians David Baddiel, David Mitchell, Frank Skinner, Omid Djalili and Ivor Dembina.

My summer began the moment my son Esteban came home after his first year of college at New York University. It was a wonderful yet overwhelming feeling. He was done with his first year of college even though it seemed like it was just a few weeks before that he had graduated from high school.  Now he was home again; dirty clothes, shoes everywhere, dirty cups, empty bags of chips and DVD cases all over the house.

My experience in London started as the airplane was making its final descent through the clouds hovering over the British capital. All of the monuments and landmarks that I've seen a million times on postcards and in coffee table books now looked like miniature models in a studio. The entirety of central London was in my view. And all of the people in it were tiny and invisible from were I was. Once I landed, I became one of those tiny people.

On Friday, students from around the world began to arrive in Singapore for the first conference of the now seven University strong Faith and Globalization Initiative. The National University of Singapore students were waiting at the university to greet their slightly bleary eyed counterparts from Mexico, Australia, USA, Canada and UK and within minutes long journeys were forgotten as the room buzzed with conversation.