Sister Sara Halabi, the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Aleppo, Syria

She was born in Laodicea, Syria, in 1979. There she graduated in 2003 from the Department of Programming and Information Systems of the School of Information Engineering at Tishreen University. In 2005, she studied at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Pontifical Gregorian University and in 2006 was awarded the diploma of Web Design and Multimedia Informatics by the Accademia Multimedia Pantheon. In 2012, her doctoral thesis entitled ‘The Use of the Internet in the Pastoral Practice of the Church’, was approved, summa cum laude, by the Department of Ethics and Sociology of the Theological School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

She has taken part in various seminars involving Christian Youth and Social Services in Syria.

In 2008, she was tonsured as a nun in the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Syria, by the local Metropolitan of Berea and Alexandretta, His Eminence Pavlos Yazigi. With the blessing of the latter, she created a number of ecclesiastical web sites, in particular the news site ‘Al-Boushra’: www.alboushra.org and the web site for the radio station ‘Radio Al-Bishara’: www.radioalbishara.org. She also worked on the creation of CDs/DVDs with an ecclesiastical and also educational content for children, among which was the CD ‘The Historical Monastery of Saint Symeon the Stylite’, in 2003.

In 2010 she took part in the ‘Pavleia VI’ international academic conference in the Holy Metropolis of Veria, Naousa and Kampania, presenting a paper entitled ‘New Institutions in the Life of the Church. Pastoral Care in the Internet Age’.