Prophetic Friendship, Sacred Space, and the Healing of Medicine
Imam Abdullah Antepli, President, Rothko Chapel
Rev. Laura Mayo, Senior Minister, Covenant Church Houston
In a time of moral injury, institutional strain, and cultural fragmentation, medicine and faith stand in need of witnesses who can speak truth with compassion, imagination, and courage. This plenary brings together Rev. Laura Mayo (Senior Minister, Covenant Church Houston; Board Member, Rothko Chapel) and Imam Abdullah Antepli (President, Rothko Chapel) in prepared reflections and an interfaith conversation on what it means to speak prophetically at the intersections of religion, health, and public life.
Drawing from Christian and Islamic traditions, and shaped by their shared leadership at the Rothko Chapel, one of the world’s most iconic spaces for contemplation, art, and justice, Rev. Mayo and Imam Antepli will explore how sacred space itself can function as a form of prophetic witness. The Chapel’s architecture, silence, light, and abstract imagery serve as a subtle frame for reflecting on how beauty, presence, and mystery hold grief, resist polarization, and invite moral imagination when words and policies fall short.
Together, they will consider how religious traditions speak prophetically not only through critique, but through creative practices - ritual, music, story, lament, hospitality, and shared silence - that rehumanize systems under duress and sustain those who serve within them. Their dialogue will engage medicine’s deepest challenges: burnout, scientific distrust, institutional collapse, and the longing for meaning in clinical work. This plenary models what the conference itself seeks to cultivate: prophetic friendship across difference, a form of witness that invites communities to dwell together in complexity, hold suffering with tenderness, and dare to imagine a more humane future for healing.
Drawing from Christian and Islamic traditions, and shaped by their shared leadership at the Rothko Chapel, one of the world’s most iconic spaces for contemplation, art, and justice, Rev. Mayo and Imam Antepli will explore how sacred space itself can function as a form of prophetic witness. The Chapel’s architecture, silence, light, and abstract imagery serve as a subtle frame for reflecting on how beauty, presence, and mystery hold grief, resist polarization, and invite moral imagination when words and policies fall short.
Together, they will consider how religious traditions speak prophetically not only through critique, but through creative practices - ritual, music, story, lament, hospitality, and shared silence - that rehumanize systems under duress and sustain those who serve within them. Their dialogue will engage medicine’s deepest challenges: burnout, scientific distrust, institutional collapse, and the longing for meaning in clinical work. This plenary models what the conference itself seeks to cultivate: prophetic friendship across difference, a form of witness that invites communities to dwell together in complexity, hold suffering with tenderness, and dare to imagine a more humane future for healing.