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Mother Maria Skobtsova (1891-1945)

by Elisabeth Behr-Sigel

Avant-garde poet in the sophisticated intellectual milieu of Saint Petersburg, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia, twice married and divorced, mother of three children, later a devoted nun of the Russian Church in exile, and finally a member of the resistance in occupied France who was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died shortly before the liberation: such was the path of Mother Maria Skobtsova’s life.

Elisabeth Behr-Sigel

Élisabeth Behr-Sigel was possibly the most significant female Orthodox theologian of the 20th century. As a young Lutheran, she studied philosophy in Strasbourg alongside Emmanuel Levinas. She joined the Orthodox Church in 1929, after attending Paschal Matins celebrated by Fr. Sergius Bulgakov in Paris and meeting Paul Evdokimov, Vladimir Lossky, and Fr. Lev Gillet. She subsequently became an active participant in the Parisian Orthodox theological circle, and in 1976 completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Nancy on the theologian Alexander Bukharev. She was the author of many books and articles on Orthodox theology and spirituality.

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