Conger

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Yale University appointment arose from his foreign policy triumphs and commitment to the transforming role of faith in world affairs, the dean of Yale Divinity School said last week.

The comments by Dean Harold Attridge followed Mr. Blair’s April 3 speech at Westminster Cathedral on “Faith and Globalization,” where the former prime minister argued religious faith continued to have relevance in the affairs of state.

The former prime minister will seek to develop his thinking while serving as the Howland lecturer at Yale University and in September he will begin teaching a class to Anglican and Congregationalist seminarians and students from the university’s business school.

The Divinity School contacted Mr. Blair in late 2006, inviting him to lecture, Dean Attridge said on April 4. And “unbeknownst to us, at the same time [Yale President] Rick Levin had also sent a letter exploring the possibility of coming as a visitor of some sort after he stepped down from his public office.”

The prime minister’s office declined both offers at the time, but “he contacted us through his staff after he had stepped down from the prime minister’s job and indicated that he was interested in pursuing some initiatives having to do with religion and globalization in his retirement,” the dean said.

The choice of Yale was prompted by his son’s enrollment at the University, Dean Attridge said, as “Tony had a knowledge of the place and some sense of its resources and scope.”

The role of religion in public life “is very timely,” he noted, and the former prime minister said he was “very much interested in exploring both the ways religion has been misused and has caused harm to human beings and the way in which it can be used as a very positive element of contemporary life.”

Yale lauded Mr. Blair’s work as prime minister saying he was instrumental “in bringing peace to Northern Ireland,” had “played a role in the Balkans, in the dislocation caused, in part at least, by the cultural and religious traditions there,” and was presently “involved in the Middle East peace initiative.”

“He’s wrestled for some time with issues of religion and its role on the contemporary scene and has given it a lot of thought and wants to continue that in a setting where the resources of a great university would be a part of the conversation,” Dean Attridge said.

The former prime minister’s course will be a seminar for theological and business students “team-taught” with members of the Yale faculty. “Blair will be here on site for about five or six sessions of the course, and he’ll be in town for, oh, probably two days, at each of those sessions, and he’ll also be involved in some public events connected in some way or other to the course,” he noted.