Today, from Istanbul, we experience some of the great spiritual tensions and possibilities

of our world, the art of religious otherness and the dialogue of life.

We meet a bishop of Eastern Orthodox Christianity which still has its base in this Muslim nation.

First, we speak with a Roman Catholic Dominican monk who lives in Istanbul.

The Dominicans began as an order of preachers and fighters of heresy.

As part of this tradition, Alberto Ambrosio is living a Christianity inspired by his study of Islam.

He calls this a wonderful paradox, a life-giving contradiction.

I love this contradiction.

I'm closer to the idea of human meeting.

I mean, I know that I'm in Catholic and I'm still very close to this philosophy and theology,

but at the same time, I can be open-minded to see what God creates.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being from APM, American Public Media.

Istanbul, of course, is the former Constantinople, named after the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity.

The story of one of the city's great monuments, the Hagia Sophia, offers a kind of microcosm of the story of Christianity here.

This architecturally astonishing structure is the second largest church building in the world and one of the most ancient.

It was first the Byzantine seat of Christianity and later a mosque of the Ottoman Empire.

Today it's a museum of the Turkish Republic.

He was at the suggestion of several Muslims that I visited Alberto Fabio Ambrosio at his monastery.

He's lived in this city since he was in his 20s.

He's an emerging teacher about Islam within Roman Catholicism.

And he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the whirling durvishes,

who the poet Rumi inspired in this land in the 13th century.

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