Demon possession extreme example of battle for the soul

Hillaire Kallendorf tells the Dallas Morning News:

I see demonic possession as merely an extreme example of the battle for the soul. That's not to say everyone's possessed; that would be absurd. But it's to say that exorcism gives us an opportunity to look up close at a very exaggerated form of what happens to everyone.

I have an article in which I look at deathbed scenes from art, and I read exorcism manuals that deal with the moment of death. This bleeds over into a different genre, the "art of dying." These authors are trying to write something to help people die well. At every single deathbed [scene], there is an angel at the head of the bed and a demon at the foot, and they are fighting over who'll get possession of that soul.

So I don't think that it's wrong to say that demonic possession is just an exaggerated version of what happens to everybody, in every life, with every moral choice.

There is a constant war going on between good and evil. That's what we can learn from it. It's relevant.

Have you ever seen an exorcism?

Not really. As a child, I did go to charismatic revival-type prayer meetings where there were strange things going on. I did have, in the past couple of weeks, a woman contact me to request an exorcism. She had been heavily involved with the occult. I walked her through the steps to salvation and referred her to a priest.

But really, I study the Renaissance, I study literature and art and representations of exorcism. I do believe there's something there, but there are a lot of fakes. In the Renaissance, there were lots of fakes.

People ask me all the time, "What do you believe?" In my dissertation, I had 80 historical cases of exorcism. We have no idea what really happened there. Reading the accounts, some of them you can be fairly certain were proved to be adolescent children who wanted attention, and the pamphlets printed about them were useful to charlatans who wanted to fake the symptoms of possession. But in some cases, it does seem like something was going on, but nobody can say what it was.

But that's what religion does: fills in the spaces between what we can understand and what we can't. Personally, I wouldn't want to believe in a God I could fully understand. Then he wouldn't be God.