There are Sunday mornings at Christ Church Cathedral when the Dean’s Hour feels less like a conversation series and more like a gift — a reminder of why this downtown cathedral has anchored Houston’s spiritual and civic life for nearly two centuries. The recent morning Dean Katz welcomed Imam Abdullah Antepli, the newly inaugurated president of the Rothko Chapel, was one of those mornings.
For just under an hour, two faith leaders — an Episcopal priest and a Muslim imam — sat together before a congregation and did something that sounded simple but was, in practice, quite rare: they spoke honestly. About difference. About fear. About holy envy. About what’s broken in American interfaith life, and what, with courage, might yet be built.
The Arrival of Something New at the Rothko Chapel
Dean Katz opened by introducing Antepli with a warmth that made clear this was no formal institutional handshake. “I’m honored to be in conversation and to call him a friend,” he said.
The accolades are real: Antepli served as Duke University’s first-ever Muslim chaplain, later becoming an associate professor of the practice of interfaith relations at Duke Divinity School. He is the only Muslim chaplain to have delivered prayer before the U.S. House of Representatives — twice, in 2010 and again in 2017. He has been honored by the Anti-Defamation League with the Daniel Pearl Award for his work building bridges between Jewish and Muslim communities. In 2023, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
But credentials, Antepli made clear from his very first words, are not the story. The story begins somewhere else entirely.
“My journey started in the southeastern part of Turkey,” he said. “I grew up in a slum. My parents have no formal education. My mom still signs official documents with a fingerprint ink.” He described arriving at Duke’s Gothic campus every morning and pinching himself. “Is this actually real?”
Now he walks into the Rothko Chapel — that singular, non-denominational sanctuary of art, prayer, and human dignity — and feels something similar. He came to Houston, he said, not for a job, but for a vision. In a room full of people who likely know and love this city, he said what Houstonians rarely hear said about their city on the national stage: “Houston is one of the most underrated, underappreciated, and misunderstood cities in America.”
“I believe Houston is remarkably poised to exemplify what America will look like in 30 years — a multicultural, multi-religious, harmonious, peaceful, constructive American social fabric. That’s why I came here. That’s why I’m here.”
On Diversity That Doesn’t Work
Dean Katz, characteristically, didn’t let the beautiful vision sit unexamined for long. “That all sounds really nice,” he said with a smile — “but to make that happen, you can’t just wave a magic wand.” What, he asked, do you actually bring to this work? What have you learned about getting into the grist of building a genuinely diverse, interfaith community?
What followed was one of the most honest assessments of diversity’s promises and dangers heard in this space in recent memory.
Antepli is certain of very few things in life, he said, but among them is this: “I am absolutely certain — one hundred percent sure — that our diversity, our differences, are from creation.” But he is equally certain of something else: diverse communities do not automatically produce pluralistic, harmonious ones.
“Just because you bring people of different backgrounds, and they live together and do business together — if that diversity has not been encouraged and facilitated through education and spiritual and moral teachings, it often ends with violence.”
He named the history: Turks and Armenians, who lived together for a thousand years. Germany before the Second World War. Rwanda. “Difference could be a curse,” he said simply. “It is not only a blessing. It’s not just about having the best food of different variety.”
“If human nature is not tamed, spiritually nurtured — its innate fear of difference, of the unknown — it could easily turn into violence and something incredibly ugly.”
The implication was clear and sobering: the work of pluralism isn’t ambient. It doesn’t happen by proximity. It requires intention, institutions, and courage.
The Problem with “Common Ground”
Here Antepli offered what may have been the morning’s most provocative insight — a critique aimed not at enemies of interfaith dialogue, but at its well-meaning friends.
Too often, he argued, interfaith engagement is designed around sameness. “Our invitation to pluralism should not be done the way it’s more often done — by inviting people to focus on just common things, focus on what we share.” That’s a fine starting point, he acknowledged. But when the conversation ends at commonality, it fails.
“The intention — the deliberate intention — to build relationship across difference must from the very beginning invite: bring your differences. Bring your moral convictions. Bring your disagreements. Let’s create a space for engaging those differences without flattening them, without erasing them.”
Erasure, whether of race, religion, tradition, or conviction, is not inclusion. It is a quieter form of disappearance. True pluralism, Antepli argued, asks something harder of us: to be fully present, and to let the other be fully present too.
What’s Getting in the Way
Dean Katz reflected that earlier generations of interfaith leaders spent decades simply establishing the premise that people of different faiths could talk to one another, that they did share common humanity. That work mattered. But we’ve, in some sense, arrived at that premise — and now the question is what comes next.
Antepli offered several observations about what continues to block meaningful engagement.
The first is the lack of well-defined stakes — what he called carrots and sticks. The sticks are violence and the erosion of democracy. Those are real. But the carrots, he argued, are equally profound and far too rarely named.
“There is a remarkable missed opportunity,” he said, “if you want to understand who you are in this modern, highly globalized world.” He described his 17 years teaching Islamic theology to Protestant seminarians at Duke Divinity School. When the program later interviewed alumni about what most deepened their Christian faith and sense of calling, they often pointed not to courses in Christian theology — but to courses on Judaism and Islam.
“Learning about the other is not just tolerating them, merely preventing violence. There is a way in which it could enhance and make you deeply rooted in your own faith tradition.”
He reached for a phrase coined by theologian Krister Stendahl: holy envy — that moment when you encounter something in another tradition so beautiful, so particular, so true, that you feel almost jealous. “If you haven’t experienced holy envy,” Antepli said, “I think it’s a really missed opportunity.”
Holy Envy: A Two-Way Conversation
This led to one of the morning’s most genuinely tender exchanges. Both men named what they envy.
For Antepli, the first is Shabbat. In a world driven by the most successful religion he knows — capitalism — with its relentless mandate to get more, have more, acquire more, here is a tradition that for five thousand years has said: stop. Once a week, stop the external journey and begin an internal one.
“When my Jewish colleagues hear my approach to Shabbat, they say, ‘I wish more Jews would appreciate Shabbat the way you do.’ That is holy envy.”
His second comes from Christianity. In eight years working humanitarian relief projects across Southeast Asia, his closest partners were Christian charities. “I have never seen anything so beautifully and profoundly manifested at large scale than in Christianity — the conviction that loving God necessitates loving humanity. That sense of lifelong devotion, that selflessness — the scale is almost incomparable.”
Dean Katz, in turn, named his deep admiration for Jewish mourning practices — the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Kaddish year, the ongoing community practice of accompanying the grieving not just through a funeral but through a full year of grief and beyond.
“We can so easily make our way through a funeral and that’s it,” he said. “There is really no other identification in our tradition of the reality of grief as a road walked over a long period of time.” He noted the parallels he has found in Día de los Muertos practice in Latin American Christianity — the ofrenda, the altar, the annual return to those who have gone before.
And then he named Ramadan. “To be present at Iftar — to break fast with Muslims at sundown — is absolutely beautiful. It is an opportunity for us to be in solidarity with people taking on something profound as spiritual practice.”
Antepli laughed. “If you walk into a Muslim home and experience that sundown where these thirsty, hungry Muslims turn into lit Christmas trees as they start eating and drinking — it’s such a profoundly spiritual moment.”
On the “Nones” — and What the Church Owes Them
The conversation turned to the growing number of Americans who have left organized religion entirely — the “nones,” or as Antepli wryly insisted on spelling it out: “N-O-N-E-S. Not nuns. Although there’s nothing wrong with nuns. Good nuns.”
What strikes Antepli about this phenomenon is not the departure, but the knocking.
“Almost none of these people become militant atheists. The overwhelming majority of them are still knocking on the doors of organized religion, asking: do you have anything compelling, engaging, inspiring to tell me? Do you have anything to say about the incredible problems we face in today’s world? Do you have anything to inspire me to fill this gap I feel in my heart?”
This, he argued, is a market force — and it should be treated as one.
“Any religion that is not compelling, engaging, exciting — they should die. It’s not about religion. It’s not about church. It’s about building soul-crafts, building ethical moral societies, giving people direction on what is right and wrong. If any religion doesn’t do that in a meaningful sense, market forces should sort it out.”
The sharpness of that is deliberate. Antepli is not interested in institutional preservation for its own sake. Institutions, he noted with a certain equanimity, survive. “This house of God has been around 150 years. Rothko Chapel has been around 55 years. Institutions survive.” The question is whether they survive with purpose.
On Sharia Fears — and the Banana Peel of History
From the congregation came a searching question about anti-Sharia legislation making its way through the Texas legislature — a reality, the questioner noted, that many Houstonians are watching with concern.
Antepli answered directly. The factual case is simple: there is no evidence of a theocratic Muslim movement seeking to impose religious law on non-Muslims in the United States. “Sharia literally means in Arabic what halakha means in Hebrew — Jewish law, Jewish self-imagination. It is an ocean of literature, engagement, conversation — what is right, what is wrong — shaping individual spirituality between a person and God.”
But Antepli went deeper than the factual refutation. He placed anti-Sharia rhetoric in its historical lineage: replace “Sharia” with “papism” in 19th-century anti-Catholic literature, or with Jewish conspiracy in 1930s European propaganda, and you are reading, structurally, the same text.
“If you step on this banana peel, you will fall again. We have seen this before — how a very small minority, easy to target for geopolitical reasons, becomes a pre-election boogeyman. Communists before. Jews before. Catholics before. The same thing is happening.”
And then, with characteristic grace, he pivoted toward compassion for those on the other side of that fear. “Let’s not dehumanize people who are fearful of Sharia. If I grew up in a different part of America and all I heard about Islam was jihad, terrorism, Hamas — it is only natural that I would develop those feelings.” The answer, he said, is not condescension. It is education, involvement, relationship. He invited Houstonians to visit the Ismaili Center — “that’s Sharia in its architectural beauty, speaking concretely about the soul of Islam.”
Beauty as a Form of Justice
Dean Katz closed by asking about something central to the bond between Christ Church Cathedral and the Rothko Chapel: beauty. How does Antepli think about art and beauty as instruments not just of spiritual experience, but of moral action?
In Islam, Antepli explained, God has 99 names. Nearly 64 of them are synonymous with beauty in its many forms — beauty in justice, in compassion, in forgiveness. The Rothko Chapel’s non-representational art, its profound simplicity, its invitation to encounter something ineffable without being told what to think — “it warms my Muslim heart beyond words.”
But beauty, for him, is not decoration. It is a mode of resistance and an act of creation.
“Can you respond to the brokenness of the world by creating acts and spaces of beauty — through art, through space itself, through programming? I really hope you see the beauty of a pastor and an imam sitting together on a Sunday morning. And we should find a rabbi and walk into a bar. That’s when things get really beautiful.”
He spoke of the chapel’s founders, Dominique and John de Menil, who commissioned Mark Rothko — a Jewish American artist — to create a sanctuary for all of humanity. “On the surface we are very different,” he said of himself, the de Menils, and Rothko, “but in so many ways I feel I knew them so well. We are all orphans. We are all refugees. We are all immigrants. And we came away from our demons having seen what not engaging with difference brings.”
The moral is neither sentimental nor abstract. The de Menils fled Nazi-occupied France and understood — viscerally — the church’s failure to prevent devastation, or in some cases its complicity in it. Rothko fled Russian antisemitism. Antepli carries his own history of exclusion and violence from Turkey.
“As our social fabric is still intact, as our civil liberties are still giving us the opportunity to model how you engage across difference — we have a lot more privileges. Therefore, we are a lot more responsible to call for moral action as quickly as possible.”
An Invitation Left Open
Before the congregation dispersed — some to late-morning worship, others carrying the conversation in their hearts into the week ahead — Dean Katz made something clear: this was not a goodbye. It was a beginning.
“I hope both Christ Church Cathedral and Rothko Chapel can be part of the creation of beauty,” Antepli said, “not just superficial beauty, but relational, communal beauty — beauty that will inspire people to moral action.”
Antepli extended an open invitation to the CCC community: come to the Rothko Chapel, come to an Iftar dinner, come find a Muslim friend or a Jewish neighbor or a Hindu colleague. Half a million Muslims live in the greater Houston area, he noted. The diversity is already here. The question is whether we are willing to move toward it with intention.
“You have a brother and a home at Rothko Chapel,” he said. “Come and visit us.”
Next Sunday, the Dean’s Hour continues with Shariq Ghani, executive director of Bridges Houston, who will pick up this thread of interfaith engagement and carry it further. If this morning was any indication, the conversation is just getting started.
The Dean’s Hour takes place Sunday mornings, 10–11 a.m., at Christ Church Cathedral, 1117 Texas Ave, downtown Houston. All are welcome. See our calendar at christchurchcathedral.org.