Lecture by Rémi Caucanas in Ottawa

On Wednesday, 18 May 2022, Rémi Caucanas delivered a lecture entitled “Islam and Christianity in Dialogue... under Beethoven’s Moonlight” at Saint Paul University in Ottawa. The event was promoted by the Dante Alighieri Society Ottawa Committee in collaboration with the Faculty of Theology of the same university, represented by its dean, Prof. Michel Andraos.

In his presentation, Rémi Caucanas compared the recent history of Christian-Muslim relations to the three movements of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor (‘Moonlight’): starting with the adagio sostenuto (the colonial period in the early 20th century), passing through the allegretto (the four years of the Second Vatican Council in which the Church carried out an epoch-making revolution in rethinking its relationship with the Islamic world and other religions), to arrive at the presto agitato (the post-conciliar euphoria).

Rémi Caucanas is a researcher at the Institut de Recherches et d’Études sur le Monde Arabo-Musulman (IREMAM, Aix-en-Provence) and at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI). He was director of the Institut Catholique de la Méditerranée (Marseille) from 2014 to 2016 and taught at Tangaza University College (Nairobi) from 2018 to 2021. He currently lives in Ottawa where he teaches History of Christian-Muslim Christian Relations at Saint Paul University.