Note: Just tonight, I realized that an essay that was first published elsewhere was no longer online. After some searching through the Wayback Machine, I found it again and post it here for posterity’s sake.

This essay is a response of sorts to a post on Scott Greider’s blog in which he criticizes a local Uno’s Pizzaria for looking like an old urban building but actually being a new suburban building. I agreed with Scott’s concerns, but offered a different perspective. The Uno’s in question has since closed.

My friend Scott is frustrated with a pizza place.

He enjoyed the food, he liked the prices, and he thought the service was acceptable.

But he still feels like he’s been lied to — by the building itself.

“What made this place so cool — primarily its atmosphere — was … well … inauthentic!” Scott said on his blog after his visit to Uno’s Chicago Grill in Fort Wayne.

“You see, this was a brand new building out in the sprawling suburbs on a lot surrounded by parking spaces that was intentionally trying to look and feel a hundred years old.”

He’s right, especially when he compares the Fort Wayne restaurant to the original Uno’s in Chicago.

My family and I ate at the original Uno’s last year, and while we ate deep-dish authentic Chicago pizza elbow-to-elbow around a table a bit too big for the tiny dining room, even the youngest of us knew we weren’t just taking in a pizza. We were taking in history.

Scott also could have mentioned any number of other instantly rustic restaurants, the most famous being Cracker Barrel.

But restaurants are far from alone in this marketing of fake authenticity. Janelle L. Wilson, in her book “Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning,” describes how the past is making a comeback in American consumerism:

“Consider how appeals to nostalgia are made within popular culture as a marketing strategy, inviting consumer participation. Restaurants as well as sports bars display old artifacts and memorabilia on the walls; movies are remade; television programs that feature reunions of casts from old shows are produced; and advertising campaigns conjure up images from the past to authenticate the item and attract consumers’ attention.”

But I contend there is something real behind this fake authenticity, something that I’d say is good and decent. And those who want to preserve and recapture our city’s downtown as a place of destination and a true city center should look to this fake authenticity as a source of hope.

It may seem that this fake authenticity is ridiculous, since we’re making cold steel buildings look like old brick.

But it’s nothing compared to the decades we spent making old brick buildings look like cold steel.

The Abandonment and Desecration of Downtown

We can blame the post-World War II economic boom and the post-World War II baby boom. We can blame the automobile, the Interstate Highway System, suburbia and single-use zoning. And more than anything, we can blame the modernist mindset that trampled the glories of the past on its march to a plasticized future.

But for these reasons and many more, from about World War II through the 1970s, from government to retail to churches to Urban Renewal, the unquestioned assumption was that old buildings and old farmland should be replaced with new buildings and new aesthetics. These aesthetics reflected our country’s love affair not just with the car, but with the parking lot.

With more and more people becoming more and more mobile and spread out, there seemed to be less and less reason to go to a centralized downtown. This was especially true with shopping centers popping up closer to our homes, even though they were built in a way that compelled you to arrive by car, not by foot.

And then lot of architecture, like poetry and orchestral music, grabbed modernism’s strength but let go of warmth and humanness. In fact, not being understood by the masses became a badge of honor in the arts.

Worse, our downtowns often tried to compete by imitation. The modern trappings of the bland suburban shopping center, with aluminum siding and huge signs covering the richly detailed facades, became the last desperate measure of an emptying downtown trying to entice shoppers to come back.

Because of its former splendor and importance, most people today are down on downtown.

But now, for the first time in a long time, businesses are lauded and even rewarded when they locate within existing downtown structures.

Woodson Motor Sports moved to an older building in downtown Fort Wayne. But the business received some grief because, instead of working with the existing facade, the business covered the building with brightly colored steel siding.

Similarly, the Allen County Republican Party fixed up its downtown headquarters, but found themselves under attack for modernizing the look of the building and adding large shopping-center-style signs.

My friend Scott is absolutely right in saying that an Uno’s within any number of existing downtown brick and mortar buildings would be beautiful and authentic. But is fake authenticity really bad for society?

A Small Defense of Fakeness

Why would anyone defend something that’s intentionally fake? Such an argument certainly goes against modern culture.

Everything from original thought to outrageous behavior is defended with the argument that at least it’s not fake. It’s just honest. It’s the real world. You’re just being true to yourself.

Then our society turns and critiques earlier, more genteel cultures, and says that the manners and mores are just more fakeness that we’re glad to be done with. Much of our literature and movies that look back to bygone days such as the 1950s like to imagine that beneath the sheen and air of perfection lies dissatisfaction and hypocrisy, with the honest, true people longing to break the bonds of polite, but fake, society.

This disdain for anything fake explains the starkness of certain kinds of modern buildings. For example, when you enter Fort Wayne’s Arts United Center, why do you see concrete blocks? The answer is simple: Because the building is made out of concrete blocks. Hiding them with creative embellishments would be considered a form of architectural dishonesty.

As I write this, I’m sitting in the Fort Wayne community center. It’s a modern building that serves its purpose with efficiency. But what is its aesthetic? Exposed concrete blocks. Nothing inauthentic here! The building was built with concrete blocks, and by Jove, you’re going to see nothing but concrete blocks.

But what explains our parallel longing for the past? We are a people surrounded with more riches than kings could have imaged a century ago, but yet we still look with nostalgia to the time of our childhood, or even to the time of someone else’s childhood.

But why would a modern people with all kinds of disposable income spend their money for things that remind them of a time when such income didn’t exist? Svetlana Boym, in “The Future of Nostalia,” says:

“Nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires … to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”

Can the existence of this strong sentiment of nostalgia give us hope for the future of our city? Kimberly Smith, in her “Mere Nostalgia: Notes on a Progressive Paratheory,” would have to answer yes:

“(W)e should recognize that remembering positive aspects of the past does not necessarily indicate a desire to return there. Remembering the past should instead be seen as a way to express valid desires and concerns about the present — in particular, about its relationship (or lack of relationship) to the past.”

So, our longing for things of old doesn’t necessarily mean we’re all just living in the past, or would want to be. It means that we have concerns about the present that we think may find their solutions in the past.

What are these concerns? There are dozens of likely suspects, but I say one big common reason for nostalgia is a sense of the loss of community.

Why do cities exist? It’s because people have historically needed other people, and cities were a great thing to build to help lots of different kinds of people live close together. When your income was not enormous, you needed other people to bring goods and services closer to you. And when you wanted a conversation, or a concert, you were stuck with whoever lived near you. That’s why cities as relatively small as Fort Wayne has an orchestra. How else were you going to hear an orchestra? Take the bus to Indianapolis?

But now, even the poorest of us is relatively rich. Our “communities” have lengthened and narrowed. We shop at the shopping center that fits our economic profile. We travel by car to a church across town. We find hundreds of people just like us on the Internet. We encase ourselves in music and movies from across the globe and across the decades. So the relationship with our true next-door neighbor suffers.

Still, this longing is a very good sign. There was a time, not that many decades ago, when our society thought the concerns of the present could find their answers only in the bright and distant future. The past, because it was the past, was disqualified. Now it’s back in the running.

Why Honoring the Past Is Good

It all comes down to the Christian virtue of loving your neighbor.

It’s cheating to live anywhere with the intent to find neighbors exactly like you, either in a subdivision of people with similar incomes or an online community of people with similar interests.

Instead, we are to love the neighbor that we happen to have at any given minute. And the principle has wide consequences. I shouldn’t be making my neighbor feel uncomfortable as he walks down my sidewalk, whether because I neglected my yard or because I built a parking lot to the street with no space for pedestrians.

But we need to extend the definition of neighbor even further, because my neighbors are not limited to just the present. How can I live in a house and in a city, and not, in some way, keep running into the people who built this house and lived in this city before me?

Honoring history is not some empty ideal. It’s honoring real people who just happen to currently be dead. We shouldn’t hold that against them. In the case of our community, dead people do have the right to vote.

Instead of ignoring the past, we should be like my friend Scott, and encourage us 21st century dwellers to inhabit the beautiful spaces left for us by our civic ancestors. Putting a place like an Uno’s into a funky Victorian space downtown would be a crazy cool idea. And all of this nostalgia shows that there might be a good number of people who would want to patronize such a place.

Being Better Than Fake

But eventually, someone will want to build a new building. What do we say to him? What if he wants to escape the sterility seen in some of our modern forms? What if he wants to capture the magic of the past community? Can we solve the modern problems that nostalgia points to with a modern-looking building that isn’t fake?

Remember: Those old, Victorian-era forms of architecture were new at one time. What inspired the designers of buildings a hundred years ago? Can we be similarly inspired today? Can we use modern forms and structures and stop ignoring the lessons from the past?

I think so, but we first must get over our idolatrous ideas about originality.

Some originality is essential to any new building, of course. But too much originality without enough relevance – familiar forms, recognizable doors, human-scaled windows – and the visitor to the building feels unwelcome. The visitor becomes nostalgic for the good ol’ days when a sense of community was built into our city’s fabric, brick by brick.

So, let’s outdo fake authenticity. Let’s make real authenticity, whether in old buildings lovingly refurbished or new buildings painstakingly constructed to be completely modern without forgetting to love the person who happens to walk in. People, even modern people, want community and comfort and warmth and familiarity. People would rather walk by human-scaled buildings with windows than blank walls.

Whatever we create in our city, we should remember to love our neighbors. Keep doing that, and see how much real authenticity grows.Similar Posts:

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It’s funny how a seemingly innocent photo can reveal a cultural fault line.

This photo of a sign on Taylor Street in Fort Wayne posted on Fort Wayne Observed was greeted with this response:

I think it’s on “This is Why Young People Want To Leave Fort Wayne” Street.

That is: Christianity, or a certain brand of it, contributes to Fort Wayne’s brain drain.

Let me answer the implicit challenge directly.

There is a certain kind of Christian who believes “Turn or Burn” is the entire Gospel, remembers Hell but forgets Heaven and Earth, and reduces the welcome of a gracious Father to a wagging finger.

But there is another kind of Christian who knows that the goal is not escaping Hell; it’s defeating it. And to do that, this Christian loves his spouse, his children and his neighbors with vigor and joy. This Christian knows cities are rebuilt person by person, with love and patience, and does not shrink from doing a task that will have to be completed by his children and grandchildren and will need to be guarded as long as this earth lasts.

Some will be attracted to a group of such Christians. But there is a certain kind of young person who would see such a faithful church and leave town all the faster.

– Photo courtesy of Mitch Harper of Fort Wayne Observed

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Here is how Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, answers the question, emphasizing the importance of cities:

I’m throwing in with Jim Boice on this one (cf. his Two Cities: Two Loves.)

The evangelical church must stay true to its biblical foundations, and it must maintain and enhance the effectiveness of its expository preaching, the holiness of its members, the ‘thickness’ of its counter-cultural community, the fervor of its evangelism. But if it doesn’t learn how to do this in our biggest cities then we don’t have much hope for our culture.

If our cities are largely pagan while our countryside is largely Christian, then our society and culture will continue to slide into paganism. And that is exactly what is happening. Christians strengthen somewhat away from the cities and they have made some political gains, but that is not effecting cultural products much. It is because in the center cities (NYC, Boston, LA, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington DC) the percentages of people living and working there who are Christians are minuscule.

Jim Boice proposed that evangelical Christians need to live in the major cities at a higher percentage than the population at large (See Two Cities, p.163ff.) Currently 50% of the U.S. population live in urban areas (and 25% lives in just the 10 largest urban areas.) Boice proposes that evangelicals should be living in cities in at least the same percentages or more. As confirmation of Boice’s belief consider how much impact both the Jewish and the gay communities have had on our culture. Why? Though neither is more than 3-4% of the total population, they each comprise over 20% of the population of Manhattan (and in other center cities. )

So we have two problems. First, evangelicals (especially Anglos) in general are quite negative about U.S. cities and city living. Second, you can’t ‘do church’ in exactly the same way in a city as you do it elsewhere, not if you want to actually convert hard-core secular people to Christianity. There are churches that set up in cities without adapting to their environment. Ironically, they can grow rather well anyway in cities by just gathering in the young already-evangelicals who are temporarily living in the city after college. But that is not the way to make the cities heavily Christian-which is the crying need today.

– Hat tip: Justin Taylor. Photo by Francois Schnell

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(Jon) An article over on Comment magazine by Calvin College professor James K.A. Smith nicely encapsulates much of what we hope for in Fort Wayne.

Below are lots of quotes from Loving our neighbour(hood)s: The architecture of altruism. It’s full of good stuff:

The culture of “automobility” engenders a residential architecture where the three-car garage swallows almost the entire front elevation, leaving a small gap for a front door—but eliminating any room for an expansive front porch. Instead, houses are set back from the street, guarded by the fortress-like wall of garage doors, leaving us to retreat to the privacy of fenced backyards on sprawling decks—once again, insulated by pressure-treated lumber from any contact with our neighbours. Thus, our suburban “neighbourhoods” are all too often collections of privatized, insulated pods that secure us from any contact with “neighbours.” In such a world, Jesus’ command sounds a tad anachronistic and strange.

Christian exhortations to love our neighbours usually amount to encouragements to muster the will-power to care about others—a call to a resolute interiority and attitude. But what if Christian neighbour-love had a structural, material concern at its base: that we care about the very physical shape of our residential dwelling and critically consider how the material conditions of our built environment foster or detract from love of neighbour? In a world where the built environment threatens to squelch the very category of “neighbour,” might not we heed Jesus’ command precisely by being concerned to build communities that encourage encounters with neighbours? Could there be an architecture of neighbour-love?

A construction of the world that finds us sequestered in insulated pods—emerging only into smaller, mobile, insulated pods—must make an impact on how we see ourselves and our relations to (largely invisible) others. Could there not be a link between the increased narcissism and polarity of North American culture and that many adults spend two hours a day by themselves in maddening commuter traffic, with the inanities of talk radio as a soundtrack?

Loving our neighbour means more than mustering kind feelings toward anonymous others. It might require, here and now, that we commit ourselves to building (or better, recovering and redeeming) built environments in which neighbours actually show up to be loved.

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(Jon) There is no such thing as piety that is only private. The following verse is from our public confession at church this morning:

“By the blessing of the upright a city is exalted, but by the mouth of the wicked it is overthrown.” Proverbs 11:11 ESV

If the upright remain hidden behind closed doors in a life lived only in a small, safe sanitized haven, then of course the city is not exalted. Matthew Henry, in his commentary on this verse, says, “Good men are public blessings.” (emphasis mine) Henry mentions three ways in which this is true:

• God blesses the Christian: “By the blessings with which they are blessed, which enlarge their sphere of usefulness.”
• The Christian blesses the neighbor: “By the blessings with which they bless their neighbours, their advice, their example, their prayers, and all the instances of their serviceableness to the public interest.”
• And God blesses the neighbor: “By the blessings with which God blesses others for their sake.”

The result? “The city is exalted and made more comfortable to the inhabitants, and more considerable among its neighbours.”

If Fort Wayne, “The City of Churches,” is not in some way “exalted,” the wicked are not the ones to blame. Fort Wayne Christians must encourage one another to be good to our city, by blessing our neighbors. And in return, God promises to exalt our city.  Similar Posts:

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(Jon) Today I have the pleasure of pointing you to an excellent summation of what we’re hoping to accomplish here at The Good City.

This article, called “Urban Paradox: Reconnecting Church and the City,” was published in byFaith magazine and written to a more general Christian audience, so it starts with a bedrock Biblical foundation:

Biblical Christianity is about land, about subways, cars, and high rises. It affirms God as Creator, and as sovereign over every bit of creation. Therefore our responsibility as stewards, as those who have been given dominion, is to safeguard God’s work, and His pleasure in it. Our concern is that God be pleased when He looks to our cities.

The authors of the article, Michael Van Pelt and Rob Joustra of the Work Research Foundation, discuss New Urbanism and how it’s difficult to encapsulate what it actually is. But still, it’s principles aren’t really new at all:

The concern of New Urbanism for community, whole development, and human flourishing is not merely the concern of the institutional church; it forms the matrix of what we Christians call “good news.” In many ways what is striking is not why municipal leaders and New Urbanists should look at churches as allies, but rather, why church leaders have been conspicuously absent from this dialogue. Can community be built from within the physical form of traditional towns without under-girding social structures? What part can churches play in New Urbanism and the revitalization of urban spaces?

Van Pelt and Joustra give the church three ways to answer those questions:

• Befriend the stranger in the city
• Help create human comfort in the city
• Create sacred spaces that relate to the city

And in conclusion:

Urban renewal requires the kind of vision and action that churches and people of faith possess. It is an urban vision firmly entrenched in the knowledge of the creator God, acted out faithfully in response to His Word, with contextual reflection. There is almost no limit to the imaginative manifestations that such a church can take. But churches and Christians must begin to take this kind of earthy Christianity, which bespeaks such pertinence to architecture, community, and transit more seriously if they are to realize a vision of urban centers built and sustained for human flourishing and the glory of God.

Be sure to read the whole article.

Photo by Christine (bpc) on Flickr

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(Jon) What are the four saddest words you might hear after church on Sunday?

“See you next week!”

What a depressing sentiment! We saints gather together every Sunday under one roof. We enter the very sanctuary of God together, we praise Him together, we receive the Word together and share Christ’s body and blood together. We are, in fact, knitted together as One Bride, as the very Body of Christ Himself.

Then, so often, we make no effort to reinforce our solidarity and community with one another between Sunday mornings.

“See you next week!”

That means I won’t invite you over for supper and you won’t try to find any common activity that we can share. I won’t see you at the store or at a coffeehouse. In fact, it means it’s our intention to live completely separate lives from one another, lives that touch for only a few hours a week out of the hundred hours a week we spend awake.

“See you next week!”

Don’t let those four words be the last ones you say to your brothers and sisters tomorrow. Try these instead:

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Come over for lunch!”

“Let’s get together soon.”

These sound so simple as to be too obvious. But we can build each other up only if we see each other more than once a week. Let’s clear our schedules for each other.Similar Posts:

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Is the American church judgmental, hypocritical and too political? That’s what most young non-Christians think.

What should your church do about it?

Local blogger Charles Langley asked me to read his post on the book “unChristian” and let him know what I think. I’m grateful he asked. I recommend you go there and read his post yourself, and come back.

The point of the book is that young non-Christians have a low view of Christians, and the church should recognize this view and endeavor to address it. From Charles’ blog:

Among young non-Christians, nine out of the top 12 perceptions were negative. Common negative perceptions include that present-day Christianity is judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), old-fashioned (78%), and too involved in politics (75%) — representing large proportions of young outsiders who attach these negative labels to Christians.

But these negative perceptions of Christians aren’t limited to non-Christians:

Even among young Christians, many of the negative images generated significant traction. Half of young churchgoers said they perceive Christianity to be judgmental, hypocritical, and too political. One-third said it was old-fashioned and out of touch with reality.

In one large sense, I agree. Many American Christians have been judgmental in a way that leaves no avenue for forgiveness. Many have been and are hypocritical, for example, in its treatment of homosexuality as a greater sin than any else, including divorce. Many have been political in ways that have placed shame on the church. Spend enough time in evangelical churches, as I have, and you will see everything from pettiness to outright racism.

In another sense, though, I’m skeptical, for two rather snarky reasons:

• If you get most of your theological training from “The Daily Show” and the occasional news magazine, aren’t you going to have a skewed view of Christianity?
• If you call a group of people you don’t know judgmental, aren’t you being judgmental yourself? And isn’t that hypocritical?

But let me set all of that aside and get to the nut of my disagreement with survey-driven theology.

First, Americans always distrust the faraway and vague more than the close-up and local. Notice how Americans give Congress incredibly low approval ratings, but still usually vote in their own incumbents. It’s similar to what Mrs. Winifred Banks sings in “Mary Poppins”: “Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid.” That’s funny because there’s a kernel of truth to it. People tend to distrust distant organizations more than they distrust local groups.

Second, and more importantly, Americans love these quantitative surveys way too much. Maybe we kiss up to these numbers because we fear them, and we fear them because we’re not that good at math. So we erroneously take what is at best a snapshot from an altitude of 20,000 feet and try to apply it without care to our local neighborhood.

But Christians don’t belong to Christianity. Christians belong to churches. And once we try to apply the survey to particular neighborhoods and churches, even in our small city, we begin to see the limitations of the survey.

What is the relationship of the unchurched of Aboite to The Chapel? Is it the same as the relationship between the unchurched of West Central to Emmanuel Lutheran? Is it the same as the relationship between the unchurched of the East Rudisill Boulevard neighborhood to Southern Heights Baptist Church?

This book states the problem in an unhelpful manner. Because if you say, “How do we solve the problem of Americans distrusting Christianity?” the answer is going to trend toward mass communication and marketing. That’s fine for McDonald’s, but not fitting for the church.

But if you say, “How do we solve the problem of your non-Christian neighbor distrusting you as a Christian?” the answer is much more focused, more human and, dare I add, more Biblical.

I can seek forgiveness from you for real particular sins. My church can even seek forgiveness for its corporate sins. But “Christianity” cannot seek forgiveness for the poor perception that “young non-christian Americans” have of it.

Sin, forgiveness and love apply to particular people, not to statistical groupings. If local churches truly love their local neighbors, books like “unChristian” will no longer be sold.

– Jon Swerens

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Last night’s blogger and politics conference was everything I had hoped for: An opportunity to meet with local bloggers and politicians and to get to know them better, especially while hanging out afterward at J.K. O’Donnell’s.

But the evening had its low point. Moderator Nathan Gotsch played gotcha with a local blogger during Gotsch’s 40-minute opening speech.

The blogger, Dan Turkette, had been invited to participate in the evening’s panel discussion because of his involvement with the recent election. But first, Gotsch treated Turkette and the audience to a surprising amount of direct criticism of Turkette’s blog. The audience did not universally consider the speech to be classy.

Turkette left in the middle of Gotsch’s speech.

What should we remember in these situations where we meet opponents face-to-face? Here are a few things to consider:

Don’t sandbag your opponent. Here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

to “sandbag” is to intentionally understate one’s strength, with the intention of deceiving one’s opponents into overreaching. The sandbagger can then reveal a hidden strength to take the opponent by surprise.

If you have a strong argument, you don’t have to set up your opponent unfairly like Gotsch did to Turkette. Giving your opponent an opportunity to respond also shows that you have a modicum of respect for him.

Don’t bait and switch. Not every problem requires one of those big secret set-up interventions. Don’t turn a party into a venue to win that argument with your uncle. If you must disagree with someone, try straight talking first, without the fake set-up.

Don’t be anonymous. I understand some people have a desire to use a pseudonym, but Biblically, anonymous accusations have zero weight. Use your name if you want to be taken seriously.

Don’t assume you have more friends than you do. This error encourages you to take a battle to a public setting, who may not appreciate being dragged into it.

Don’t assume you have more enemies than you do. This only causes you to lash out at possible allies, alienating those who may actually agree with you.

Don’t take private sins public. A lot of people love to see celebrity secrets dished for all to see. And there’s a temptation to bring that philosophy down to the local level. Don’t. Go to the person first, as Matthew 18 instructs us.

If we’re going to be neighbors on the blogosphere — and in real life, too — then we need to much more carefully weigh our words. Being professional online means nothing if we can’t be professional in person.

– Jon Swerens · photo by Marlon Hammes on Flickr

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This is a repost from my own blog at www.jonswerens.com.

Soon after my wife and I became Christians, the first holiday out the window was Halloween. It was obviously devilish, and we wanted our children to have nothing to do with it.

Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, Satanism scaremongers like the now-discredited Mike Warnke saw nothing but evil in the celebration of Halloween. American Christians, steeped in the belief that the end times were upon us, were all too eager to believe the worst about any subject.

As my wife and I grew to understand more fully the sovereignty of God, our views on Halloween relaxed. But we were never completely comfortable with the idea.

Until a few years ago, when one well-written article dismantled all manner of faulty prejudices.

You must read the whole article. For one thing, it’s short. Well, kinda short. For another, it’s rare to find someone with this opinion of what is so commonly believed to be a Satanic holiday co-opted by the church. The truth may very well be the opposite:

(M)any articles in books, magazines, and encyclopedias are written by secular humanists or even the pop-pagans of the so-called “New Age” movement. … These people actively suppress the Christian associations of historic customs, and try to magnify the pagan associations. They do this to try and make paganism acceptable and to downplay Christianity. Thus, Halloween, Christmas, Easter, etc., are said to have pagan origins. Not true.

Oddly, some fundamentalists have been influenced by these slanted views of history. These fundamentalists do not accept the humanist and pagan rewriting of Western history, American history, and science, but sometimes they do accept the humanist and pagan rewriting of the origins of Halloween and Christmas, the Christmas tree, etc. We can hope that in time these brethren will reexamine these matters as well. We ought not to let the pagans do our thinking for us.

Read the entire article here.

Now, if you still have serious moral reservations about Halloween, then don’t you dare celebrate it. As the Bible says, if you think it’s a sin, then to you, it is a sin.

But if all you’ve had is some sort of vague unease, then you can relax. Halloween is one of the few holidays left that are natural times to get to know your neighbors. Pass out candy (full-size Hershey bars — no apples or tracts, please) and talk to the wandering kids and their parents. Be friendly and be real.

On October 31st, the world is quite literally at your doorstep.

BONUS: Carve your own online pumpkin.

— Jon Swerens

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