A meditation on the role of the Dominican in the modern world with a foreword by Timothy Radcliffe OP.

Bruno Cadoré has recently completed his nine year term as Master of the worldwide Dominican Order - an order which includes men and women, friars and nuns and also a very large 'Third Order' of lay people and workers.

To be Master of the order means constant travel, living out of a suitcase. But as a result of this experience, Cadoré has developed a new and invigorating vision of the Charism of the Dominican Order, the res dominicana.

Cadoré's father was born in Martinique and thus remained something of an outsider to European culture - this background has been an essential part of the vision he has brought to the role. But this book is fundamentally about engagement, engagement the Dominican way. Cadoré talks of the murder of the Dominican bishop Pierre Claverie by Muslim fundamentalists, the community of Dominican nuns and brothers who continue to live and work in Baghdad, and his own experience of extreme poverty when he returned to work among the native people in Haiti.

In the pages of this book, Cadoré, in an incisive and illuminating manner, writes of the future of the planet, of humankind, of a universal conscience which is compassionate and demanding but focussed always on the Dominican motto, the one word: Truth.

This book may be of Dominican inspiration but it is a book which should be read by all people of goodwill.