The Power of Evil  This seems like an appropriate day to post
this: Richard Mouw, former president of Fuller Theological
Seminary and prominent evangelical philosopher and theologian,
thinks about Halloween and the power of evil (in his typically
nuanced way) in First Things:  My parents were Evangelicals, but
they always enjoyed Halloween. My father was a pastor, and he
and my mother would put on a yearly Halloween party for the
young people’s group at our church. They would decorate our
house with witches on broomsticks, ghosts, and pumpkin faces. My
dad would turn the lights down at some point and tell a story
designed to frighten the partying teens. We always also had a
good supply of candy in stock for the Trick-or-Treaters, and I
was encouraged to go around our neighborhood collecting candy.
Then we would argue about how much of it I had to share at home.
None of that would play well today in evangelical congregations,
where—at the end of October, at least—a “Christ against culture”
spirit takes over f