By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez
Seven years ago in Toronto a theological initiative was born - during a conversation with Claudio Monge of the Dominican Study Institute (Dost-I) of Istanbul– to think together with other Dominicans about the meaning of preaching the Gospel in today’s laboratory cities, following the style of the order of preachers that for eight centuries has had as its motto “ueritas” to seek the truth wherever it is found, as did Albert the Great in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas and later Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, the School of Salamanca and Bartholomew de Las Casas in the 16th century until reaching the School of Le Saulchoir in the 20th century.
We exchanged many emails and virtual meetings over the years, inviting Dominican friars, sisters, and lay people dedicated to theological work to share this concern. On the horizon of those years, we saw the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE as a propitious occasion to meet in Istanbul, a city located in a symbolic territory of that ancient Christian past that today urgently calls us to return to the sources of faith.
This is a very different contemporary context from that of the Emperor Constantine and the bishops of the Eastern Church gathered at the council that defined the orthodoxy of the Christian faith in a Greek key. From the ruins of the Eastern Roman Empire, which somewhat resemble the ruins of the modern West today, we perceived the call to "give an account of the hope to anyone who asks us" (1 Peter 3:15).
Nicaea 2025 was emerging as an opportune moment to return to the sources of the living Tradition of the Christian faith in its founding event, which is the power of the love of the triune God manifested in the life and Passover of Jesus the Galilean, with the depth of the Greek categories such as person (prosopon), substance (ousia) and loving circularity (perijoresis) to spell out the mystery of the Abba heavenly revealed in Jesus Christ by the inner fire of the divine Ruah.
Along the way, the personal and professional priorities of those who initially responded to the proposal gradually shifted, until finally, last year, a group of twelve Dominican friars and sisters from Italy, the United States, Canada, Belgium, Mexico, and India began preparing a meeting in Istanbul. This would be the starting point for a shared journey toward theology at the "frontiers" of the contemporary world, as the friars' general chapters had pointed out in the post-conciliar period; located at "the fractures of humanity," as our brother Pierre Claverie, the Bishop of Algiers, murdered along with a friend and collaborator by religious fundamentalism, said; and present as preaching communities in the heart of the laboratory cities of the global village.
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Istanbul is a multifaceted and vibrant city, the epicenter of a modern Islamic culture, traversing with difficulty and imagination the tense borders between religions, cultures, and economies in the complex geopolitical context of deglobalization. Christian communities make up less than 2% of the population. The power of Turkish-style Islam and its Ottoman past shines proudly in its mosques, universities, and bazaars. The great basilica of Hagia Sophia, which served as the seat of the Christian Patriarchate of the East for over a thousand years until the collapse of Eastern Christianity in 1453, has once again become a mosque after a brief hiatus from Turkish secularism, which is now sorely missed in the country's cultural life. The church of the Chora In a newly restored neighborhood of the city, with its splendid frescoes and icons of Christian art, it is a shining flash of that Byzantine past in the midst of the effervescent modern city.
The "Nicea OP 2025" colloquium was a very modest gathering that built bridges with a few colleagues from Turkey interested in dialogue with the Christian West, especially through art and spirituality as a means of expression for the religions of the book (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), such as Professor Elif Tokay, who works on these topics with her graduate students at Istanbul University.
The program of the meeting consisted of three days of reflecting on the meaning of the Christian faith in the context of interreligious dialogue, to accompany communities of faith in living the testimony of the Eternal God amidst the ruins of modern civilization, which find in Gaza their breaking point of that "dream of reason that has produced monsters," as the Spanish engraver Francisco de Goya declared in the late 18th century.
From three theological categories common to the religions of the Book: salvation, creation, and sanctification, we shaped our dialogue, bringing each of these words into our context to interpret them today. Salvation amidst the systemic violence that produces discrimination, exclusion, and death of the majority; Creation as a cosmology of the new creation that explores ecotheology in dialogue with modern science and ancestral knowledge; and sanctification as a process of divinization of the cosmos and humanity through the power of the Spirit of God, inspiring processes of healing, memory, justice, and reconciliation, especially for the victims of humanity's violent history.
Following this path, each day we focused on one of these axes, starting with an initial presentation by one of the participants, and then engaging in an exchange of experiences and ideas about what the preaching of the Word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ means in each of these areas.
The second part of the day was led by Jean-Jacques Perennès and Elif Tokay, who, listening to the initial conversation, opened up new horizons based on their experience and reflection.
Jean-Jacques, as a French Dominican who has lived in the Arab world for more than three decades, guided us with his knowledge of Islamic cultures to think about the meaning of preaching in those worlds (Bibliography of Jean-Jacques Pérennès), very close to Pierre Claverie and the monks of Tibihrine who offered their lives in Algeria for friendship with people and communities of Islam. He worked at the Dominican Institute in Cairo (Dominican Institute of Oriental Studies), then as assistant in the apostolic life of the Dominican friars during the government of Friar Timothy Radcliffe as master of the order, and more recently as director of the Jerusalem Bible School.
Elif, as a researcher of Byzantine and Eastern Christianity around the concept of perfection or divinization (theosis) in Christian mystical thought, helped us with her comments and questions to find common ground with the spirituality of Islam. Given her doctoral work on Gregory of Nazianzus as a father of the Anatolian Church, as well as on patristic works translated from Greek and Syriac into Arabic, she opened up a unique and valuable perspective for exploring these connections between communities of believers from diverse traditions, meeting at this common point of the divinization of the cosmos and humanity.
A visit to the ruins of Nicaea, today Izink in Anatolia (Archaeologists Discover Tombs at the Underwater Basilica in İznik), on a rainy day before the colloquium, had already set a certain tone for the conversations. How could we connect that crucial moment in ancient Christianity to speak of the divine being as a loving communion amidst today's ruins with the challenges that arise for Christian, Jewish, and Islamic communities today in times of extreme violence?
At the conclusion of our meeting, we agreed to continue building collaborative networks with Dominican friars, sisters, and lay people present with their preaching in today's laboratory cities and their communities of dialogue, both local and virtual, especially with the youngest members of the Dominican family, to deepen their understanding of the faith in the service of the People of God today.
I proposed preparing the next meeting in Mexico in 2026 to continue exploring the paths of "holy preaching" in that other geography of the global and epistemic South, to search there, amidst other ruins that are those of the region of non-being and of those who dwell in the shadows of shadows, for alternative ways to live and think about the loving mystery of God from the cracks of today's hegemonic power with its idolatries and traps that have humanity and the planet in check.
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After a modest yet profound encounter with this Dominican family atmosphere, I set out to visit Cappadocia for the first time.
The land of Basil and Gregory, the famous "Cappadocian Fathers," who made a decisive contribution in the fourth century CE to developing a theology of the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Holy Trinity. Their texts had been key sources for the patristic courses I took, first in Mexico with Friar Luis Ramos in his classes at the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico), and then in Fribourg with Friar Christoph Schönborn, then a professor at that Swiss university who later served in his pastoral ministry as Cardinal of Vienna for many years.
Although I remembered having read some reference to Macrina - the eldest sister of that illustrious Anatolian family who first suffered Roman persecution and then became a promoter of the nascent monastic life - it was by going to her land that I was able to grasp her great influence as a believing woman of her time, especially in the development of an alternative spirituality to that of the Roman Empire that her brother Naucratius also explored, together with his friend Chrysaphius, as part of the early Christian monasticism on the banks of the Iris River, today Kyzilirmark, from the Pontus region.
Present-day Cappadocia bears no resemblance to its Hittite, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman past. Twenty-first-century Turkish modernity has brought modern urban centers dedicated to agriculture and mining to the region, with a powerful tourism industry catering to travelers from China, Russia, and Japan, who fill the skies of Cappadocia with hot-air balloons to fly over the archaeological sites of ancient rock-cut monasteries; or as swarms of tourists who collapse the underground cities created by its inhabitants since Hittite and Persian times to survive the intermittent wars of the rotating empires.
In the midst of these hordes of tourists today in lands of ancient history, I took on the task of making meditative walks through these places, trying to suspend time, to reread some fragments of the history of the Cappadocian Fathers and especially the The life of Macrina and her family, told by her brother Gregory of NyssaI am left with Macrina's deathbed prayer: "You, Lord, have freed us from the fear of death. You have made the end of life here below the beginning of true life for us. You rest our bodies in sleep for a time and will awaken them again with the trumpet of the end of time."
From their testimony, I am impressed by the depth of their hope, with an eschatological imagination for the day to come. Not scorning this world, but opening it to the perspective of the Love that never ends.
Perhaps this is what we need today, in times of environmental and historical catastrophe, to reflect on the mystery of God amidst the ruins of the empires of yesterday and today. To open our hearts and minds to other possible worlds, emerging from the ruins with the cries of the survivors. Other worlds, too, offered by the God of life who never ceases to love all of his creation without condition or measure.
Cappadocia, October 7, 2025
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