Christa Brown
Christa Brown is an author at Religion News Service.
All Stories by Christa Brown
NEWS FEATURE: Fighting takes toll on Chechnya’s religious groups
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service MOSCOW _ Mikhail Ivanov, a retired Baptist truck driver, talks proudly about how he lived in the Chechen capital of Grozny for 49 of his 73 years, working as a truck driver,”helping to build the city that they are destroying now.” Ivanov, an ethnic Russian who helped lead Grozny’s beleaguered […]
NEWS STORY: Russian Pentecostal congregation seeks asylum in United States
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service MOSCOW _ Over 300 members of an embattled Pentecostal church in a remote Russian city are seeking political refugee status in the United States, citing”growing threats of physical punishment and pogroms”from local law enforcement officials. While U.S. law gives priority to persecuted Jews, Pentecostals and Greek Catholics seeking to emigrate […]
NEWS FEATURE: Religious squabbling over Russian humanitarian aid
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service MOSCOW _ Religious organizations are playing a vital role in cushioning the impact of one of the leanest winters Russia has witnessed since the end of the Soviet Union. But in the process, accusations are flying back and forth that food aid is being used to win souls and line […]
NEWS STORY: Jehovah’s Witnesses win recognition in Russia
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service MOSCOW _ The Jehovah’s Witnesses, one of Russia’s fastest growing faiths,scored a surprise victory this week by winning nationwide government recognition as an authentic religion. The move will help smooth the way for the registration by local authorities of 900 Jehovah’s Witnesses congregations across Russia by year’s end, the deadline […]
NEWS STORY: Jehovah’s Witnesses again delayed in Moscow
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service MOSCOW _ The judge presiding over an important test case of Russia’s new religion law delayed the trial indefinitely Friday (March 12) by giving a panel of academicians an open-ended mandate to rule on the legitimacy of the Jehovah’s Witnesses as a faith. Jehovah’s Witnesses officials quickly decried the move […]
NEWS STORY: Bombing prompts Russian Orthodox to stress ties to Serbs
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service MOSCOW _ The Russian Orthodox Church has made a rare foray into international politics with angry denunciations of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia and by stressing solidarity with fellow Orthodox Christian Slavs.”What is being done is a sin before God and a crime from the point of view of international law,”Patriarch […]
NEWS STORY: Religion and politics, Moscow style
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service MOSCOW _ This Sunday’s (Dec. 19) parliamentary elections are unlikely to result in any fundamental changes in religious freedom issues and the balance of power among Russia’s faiths, observers here say.”In principle, I don’t think that the landscape will look that much different after the elections,”said Anatoly Pchelintsev, director of […]
NEWS FEATURE: Lawlessness threatens Russian mission work
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service MOSCOW – When it comes to religious freedom in Russia, the world’s attention is usually focused on government restrictions on minority faiths. But in volatile and lawless southern Russia, threats to religious freedom take the much more brutal form of murder and kidnapping. In the Russian Caucasus, for example, Baptist […]
NEWS FEATURE: Anti-Semitism on the rise in Russia
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service MOSCOW _ When Vadim Kruglikov opened his tongue-in-cheek”The Truth About Jews”exhibit in a small art gallery here, he was expecting everyone to understand it as a parody of Russian anti-Semites. “There was a good number of people who came off the street, looked at the exhibit and viewed it as […]
NEWS FEATURE: Even after war, Russian priest labors at icon in `defense’ of Serbia
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ Ensconced in a spartan dormitory room in the Serbian Orthodox Church’s seminary here, Roman Ilyushkin, a master icon painter from Russia, has spent weeks making his contribution to the defense of Serbia. Using materials begged and borrowed from local believers, Ilyushkin painted a reproduction of the Icon […]
NEWS FEATURE: Serb church, fearing persecution in Kosovo, turns political
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ Faced with some of the worst persecution in its history, the Serbian Orthodox Church has lashed out at Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and taken measures to halt what it fears is a wave of destruction of holy sites in Kosovo. The 6.5-million member church’s ruling Holy Synod […]
NEWS FEATURE: Belgrade’s archbishop: `Get rid of Milosevic’
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ It isn’t hard to find the home of the archbishop and metropolitan of Belgrade, Franc Perko. His house, in the center of the city, is the one marked with a big, black swastika on the door and”NATO”in large Cyrillic letters. Dismissing it as”not important,”Perko has allowed the […]
NEWS FEATURE: NATO bombing creating humanitarian crisis of `biblical proportion’
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ The head of Yugoslavia’s largest religious charity, Philanthropy, says the country is facing a crisis of”biblical proportions”as unemployment spirals with the bombing of factories and hunger looms as government wages and pensions go unpaid.”Right now people have no problem with clothing because it is warm, and everything […]
NEWS FEATURE: Imam: `It’s not easy being a Muslim in Belgrade’
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ Judging from the frequent attempts to burn down and blow up this city’s one mosque, Imam Mustafa Yusuf’s judgment that”it is not easy to be a Muslim in Belgrade”is something of an understatement. A small crater in a flagstone walk and a shrapnel-chipped wall mark the place […]
NEWS FEATURE: Serb church uses Web as a link to the world outside of Yugoslavia
By Christa Brown — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service BELGRADE _ The world’s window on the Serbian Orthodox Church is a good deal easier to find in the virtual reality of the Internet than in this city’s electricity-deprived wartime reality. Down a long, unlit and musty hallway, past the ecclesiastical court, a small museum and a tailor’s shop for […]
