Beauty for Ashes: The Spiritual Transformation of a Modern Greek Community

By Jim Forest

Book Overview

Silent as a Stone memorializes the life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, an unconventional nun who aided the persecuted Jewish people in occupied France during WWII.Confronting the horror of Nazi brutality,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0881413143
• ISBN13: 9780881413144
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press
• Length: 32 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Age Range: 8 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 3 to 7

Customer Reviews

A superb book for children [and adults!]

A great book for kids on one of the Church's great Saints of the 20th Century. Great illustrations go with a great text.

Daving others in a time of horror

Jim Forest has brought us many wonderful books about the spiritual life, looks at icons and praying with them, a recent exceptional vision of pilgrimage as a way of life: The Road to Emmaus, his fine biography of Thomas Merton, Living with wisdom, an examination of the Beatitudes. only to cite several. This children's book takes the reader into a terrible time, one in which whole families were swept up, put into horrendous conditions of imprisonment in concentration camps, the result for most being disease and death. In the midst of such darkness we encounter the light and hope and goodness of a woman honored after her own death as "Rigtheous among the Gentiles." This is the new saint, Mother Maria Skobtsova, a fascinating, unusual example of holiness in our time. Jim Forest weaves his lovely, spare text with Dasha Pacheshnaya's extraordinary photographs, most based on historical photos fo Mother Maria, Fr. Dmitri Klepinine, the hostel at Rue de Lourmel in the 15th arrondisment of Paris and the cycling stadium, Vel d'Hiver, where the French Jews were held. The story though turned into a narrative is based on first hand accounts of what Mother Maria was able to do in her visits to the stadium in th sweltering June days of 1942, as those rounded up awaited transport to the camps. Not only children but all of us need images of goodness in the face of great despair and evil. This wonderful story provide just that.