Jason Welle's Seminar at Giorgio La Pira Library

Jason Welle, OFM, Director of Studies at PISAI, gave a day-long seminar at the Giorgio La Pira Library in Palermo on September 30th.
The Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII recently founded the La Pira Library as a center dedicated to the study of the history and doctrines of Islam.
Welle’s seminar, entitled “Francis of Assisi, Sufism, and Spiritual Poverty: Comparative Insights”, shared his research on the encounter between Francis of Assisi and the Ayyubid Sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil with the librarians and full-time researchers at La Pira as well as the scholars at the Dossetti Library in Bologna, who followed the event remotely. Scheduled in conjunction with the 800th anniversary of Francis’s voyage to Damietta, this seminar focused specifically on the role that Islamic mysticism played in the intellectual and spiritual formation of the Sultan and on parallel discussions among Muslims and Christians in the period about the value of spiritual poverty and how to cultivate it.