Spaces of Stillness: Sacred Architecture, Presence, and the Work of Healing
Visit the Rothko Chapel, the Live Oak Friends Meeting House, and the Ismaili Center Houston

This excursion invites conference participants into a three-part pilgrimage through sacred spaces in Houston that embody distinct yet converging traditions of contemplation, hospitality, and moral attention. Through visits to the Rothko Chapel, the Live Oaks Friends Meeting House, and the Ismaili Center Houston, participants will explore how architecture, silence, light, and ritual shape practices of presence, discernment, and care. Each site offers a different grammar of the sacred - through abstraction, Quaker communal stillness, and Islamic devotional space - inviting reflection on how environments form the moral and spiritual capacities required for healing work. Together, these encounters prompt participants to consider how clinicians, chaplains, and scholars cultivate attentiveness, humility, and trust in settings marked by suffering, urgency, and division, and how sacred spaces can sustain ethical clarity and compassion within healthcare institutions and the public square.