One of the world’s most famous converts spoke recently about his faith and the importance of understanding other religions.

Here’s the London Telegraph:

Tony Blair spoke candidly of how studying other religions had strengthened his Catholic faith as he took part in a debate on faith and poverty in Los Angeles.

The former British prime minister, participating at an event hosted by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, the organisation he founded in May, described how “I found my own faith enriched by understanding the faith of others.”

Mr. Blair, who said he had been surprised by the “vast expanses of my own ignorance of other faiths” and was “trying to put that right now”, made the comments as he urged young people to make an effort to understand one another’s religions.

“You can find it changes your own life and makes you think about the world in a deeper way.”

The former British leader, who spoke before a multi-faith crowd of around 100 mostly young people, used the event to announce his foundation’s drive to recruit an international team of “inter-religious ambassadors” to help fight malaria in Africa.

Thirty 18 to 25-year-old activists will be selected from the UK, US and Canada for the Faith Act Fellowship programme and take part in “a 10-month journey of interfaith service” including working with health teams combating malaria.

“Halting and reversing the spread of deaths from malaria is one of today’s most urgent moral challenges,? said Mr Blair, who is also an envoy of the Quartet of Middle East peacemakers.

Mr Blair, who converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism last year, took part in a panel discussion with Hamza Yusuf, a California-based Islamic scholar, and Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur, a Muslim activist who works for non-profit organisation Malaria No More.

Much of Thursday night’s discussion focused on promoting the United Nations’ eight millennium development goals to be achieved by 2015, including eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, reducing child mortality rates and combating diseases such as AIDS and malaria.

Mr Blair said that as he had helped to draw up the goals in 2001, “I had a bit of responsibility to carry them on afterwards”. He described them as “ambitious but achievable”.

The former prime minister said his foundation was in part a response to the world becoming a place “where people are more integrated than ever before”.

“For me what’s important is that the world as it integrates has some values attached to it.” He said religious faith could either be “a force that pulls people apart or one that helps bring people together”.

His foundation’s aim was to encourage understanding between people of different faiths so they could “cooperate and work together”.

Mr Blair, who spent time in New York before coming to California, alluded to the current “global economic disorder” and how the turmoil in the American markets had reverberated around the world. He told the Daily Telegraph that witnessing the unfolding financial crisis was “shocking”.

“You’ve got to get through it, get the world economy back on its feet. The single most important thing is to get confidence back into the system.”