KOULOMZIN, SOPHIE (SHIDLOVSKY)

KOULOMZIN, SOPHIE (SHIDLOVSKY), religious educator (1903-). Her father, Serge Shidlovsky, was a vice president of Tsar Nicholas II’s Duma. From 1920 to 1922 the family sought refuge in Estonia, where she taught her first catechism class under the tutelage of Fr. Joh n Bogoyavlensky. At age eighteen she passed the Russian “gymnasium” exams while working full time in Reval (Tallin) without the benefit of attending classes, and was helped by Paul B. Anderson (q.v.) of the International YMCA to win a scholarship to attend the University of Berlin (1922–24). In 1926 Anderson and Metropolitan Evlogii (q.v.) chose her to receive a Rockefeller Fund grant to attend the Teachers’ College of Columbia University, New York, where she spent September 1926 to June 1927 and received a Master’s degree in religious education. From 1927 to 1948 she lived in France, doing religious educational work with children for the Russian Student Christian Movement.

In 1932 she married Nikita Koulomzin, an engineer, and in 1948 the family settled permanently in Nyack, New York. Shortly after her arrival she joined the Metropolitan Council’s Church School Committee and began creating religious educational materials for youth. In October 1956 she participated in the founding of the Orthodox Christian Education Commission, a pan-Orthodox body, serving as its first executive secretary, 1956–69. From 1956 to 1973 she was lecturer in religious education at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (q.v.). She is the author of Our Church and Our Children (1975), which outlines the substance of her educational philosophy, and an autobiography, Many Worlds: A Russian Life. Since 1982, she has become involved in the work of the society Religious Books for Russia, preparing several children’s almanacs and a manual of religious instruction now widely used in Russia. She attended a seminar for catechists from Russia in France in 1990, a conference on “The Spiritual Renewal of Russia” in Novosibirsk in 1991, and a conference in Moscow on religious education organized by the Patriarchate (q.v.) there in January 1994.