Tony Blair Faith Foundation

Stephanie Vogelzang, from the Tony Blair Faith Foundation wraps up our blog series, Perspectives: Religion and Public Life. 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. Policy experts, political scientists, human rights lawyers, philosophers, moral theologians and religious leaders took part in the Religion & Public Life blog series.

As part of our blog series: Perspectives: Religion and Public Life, Julie Clague examines how a specific religious identity might affect moral identity. 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. Understanding the relationship between morality and religion has preoccupied humanity’s best and brightest for millennia (think Plato, Aquinas, Kant, Nietzsche).

The UN General Assembly lies at the intersection of hopes, expectations and much denigration. Most of it is unrealistic or unfair. The creation of the UN was not an idealistic innovation – though it represented ideals and aspects that were new – but an historically recognisable continuation of international politics after the failure of the League of Nations and the impact of the Second World war on the great powers. Aside from the desire for peace and security, the dominant motif in the founding of the UN in 1945 was the inviolability of the nation state.

The film is insulting and intentionally provocative. Muslims across the world are justified in their anger. But any resultant violence against innocents is completely unjustified. Just as the source of the anger is a misrepresentation of Islam and of the message of the Prophet Muhammad, so too are some of the violent reactions which followed. What we are witnessing is not, as some on both sides would like us to believe, a battle between Muslims and non-Muslims, between the Muslim World and America, or between repression and freedom of expression.

Quinn Rollins writing for the Utah Council for the Social Studies who observed a special Face to Faith videoconference on September 12th at Brighton High School in Utah said of the event, "you could see the bridge being built before our eyes" between the two partner schools.

Today we are often bombarded with stories of intolerance, persecution and violence that are associated with religion. Religion can be used as a weapon, an excuse, a tool to oppress. We can log on to Twitter and read about it, or wait until tomorrow and read it in the newspaper. Yet, for every negative story we hear on the radio or see pop up on Facebook, there are thousands upon thousands of untold positive stories of faith and interfaith encounter.

The tragedy is that the equivalent of a tiny corner shop, or a small business working from home, can today retail religious hatred to a global market. There will be no shortage of entrepreneurs who will advertise the product, manipulate the market to their advantage. Omar al-Bakri sent out six million emails in case nobody had noticed the Danish Cartoons. The fact was that at first they hadn't.

"Proselytism, contraception, gender, abortion, homosexuality". Go to most of the great multi-lateral agencies, the people with the money, to discuss faith communities' role in global health, and this probably forms the main conversation. Perhaps as the door is shutting, the World Health Organisation's estimate that throughout sub-Saharan Africa an average of 40% of the health care is done by faith communities might get a mention.

As part of our blog series: Perspectives: Religion and Public Life Shenaz Bunglawala discusses the difficulty that many religious people find when entering the public sphere.

As part of our blog series: Perspectives: Religion and Public Life Mark Lagon traces the journey from defamation to enlightened pluralism. 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. Hot debates about defamation of religion – and of Islam in particular – reveal a lot about the gap between values voiced and political pique.