PISAI Participation at the European Academy of Religion

The PISAI academic community was well represented at the 2021 conference of the European Academy of Religion (EuARe), held in Münster, Germany, from 30 August to 2 September.

Prof. Jason Welle, Director of Studies at PISAI, was the protagonist of a panel entitled “New Directions in the Study of al-Sulamī”. The panel united several professors and graduate students researching this prominent medieval shaykh, whose millennial anniversary of death falls in 2021. Welle’s paper was entitled “‘Virtue Ethics’ in Medieval Ṣūfism: Exploring the Usefulness of a Category”. Rémi Caucanas gave a presentation in an “Author Meets Critique” session on his new book, Jacques Lanfry. Un lion, l’Eglise et l’Islam, published in the collection “Studi arabo-islamici del PISAI” in 2021.

EuARe crafts these sessions to allow in-depth debate about recent publications, and Ilaria Macconi-Heckner (Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII, Bologna/Palermo) served as the discussant for Caucanas’s book. An online panel at the conference, “Religious Experience and COVID-19: Rituality and Praxis in Europe after Pandemic”, featured Prof. Bishara Ebeid (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice), a former invited professor at PISAI, and Eleonora Pede, a doctoral student at the Faculty of Theology of Lugano who received her licentiate from PISAI in 2019. Ebeid chaired the panel and Pede gave a paper entitled, “The European Umma and the Covid-19 Pandemic”. EuARe is a research initiative launched under the high patronage of the European Parliament which offers an exchange platform to scholars, universities, centers, research infrastructures, scientific journals and publishers coming from Europe and the surrounding regions. This is the fifth annual conference for EuARe and was held in a fully hybrid format, permitting participation at all sessions either in-person or online.