Free Republic

A sixty-year-old crucifix in a small Austrian town has met an inglorious end after being cut down by a recent addition to the neighbourhood who declared it an “eyesore” and attacked it with an angle-grinder. The cross, which was erected in the Grossenzersdorf, a small suburb of Vienna, after the Second World War, (snip) stood on the grass verge outside one of the properties on Grossenzersdorf’s Augasse. Shortly after the new resident, a man described by local media as ‘Egyptian’ moved in, he started complaining to neighbours and even his local government about the crucifix.

Grand Rapids Baptist Seminary prof David Turner discussed the literal hermeneutic issue that traditionally is seen as a defining difference between covenant theology and dispensationalism. He noted, however, that its actual use in specific textual situations was determined by the presuppositions of the exegete, not by an arbitrarily chosen hermeneutical system. So we see an emerging awareness that dispensational and covenant theologies differ because of deep rooted presuppositions. The trick is to define where they are and what they are. In the following sections I will attempt to contrast the "classical" forms of each system to discover their different senses...

Cardinal George Pell has declared yet again Islam is more warlike than Christianity, this time to a US Catholic newspaper. The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney told the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) Australia hadn't been affected much by Islamic threat following the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but this could change depending "on how many terrorist attacks" Muslim fundamentalists could "bring off successfully", Fairfax newspapers report. In the interview conducted in Rome with well-known NCR reporter John L Allen, Dr Pell said "the million-dollar question" was whether intolerance was a modern distortion of Islam or arose out of internal...

Religious group objects to "Happy Birthday" songs