SPIRITUAL ALLIANCES:
DISCOVERING THE ROOTS OF HEALTH AT THE CASA DE DOM INÁCIO
Author: Emma Bragdon, PhD.
Foreword by Stanley Krippner, PhD.
From Lightening Up Press, 2002
Amazon.com: Softcover only
Psychologist Emma Bragdon goes to John of God’s healing sanctuary in Abadiania, Brazil and interviews visiting physicians and healthcare providers from the USA and Europe. They all came to expand their notions of healing and health. They also came for personal health reasons. Dr. Bragdon colorfully shares their perspectives on their experiences. This is useful for comparing John’s healing work to conventional healthcare and considering the roots of what empowers healing. The photographs of individuals and places amplifies the joy of reading.
The reader learns the story of Joao de Deus (aka, “John of God”), a world-famous Brazilian healer successful in helping people heal from all manner of physical and emotional problems through the application of spiritual healing.
Joao’s sanctuary for healing, the Casa de Dom Inacio de Loyola, welcomes people of all faiths and expects no payment for their services. Joao has been practicing spiritual healing for more than forty years and everyone from well-known luminaries (acttress Shirley MacLaine, politician Bella Abzug, Oprah Winfrey, and others) to visitors from around the world to the local poor have benefited from his ministrations.
What makes Joao de Deus’s work so unusual? He makes contact with benevolent beings from the next dimension who, thorugh him, treat each patient uniquely. As an “unconscious medium” he has no memory of what he does while he is in this altered state of consciousness, channeling. His skill, in all diagnostic, prescriptive and surgical procedures, relies on the wisdom and training of channeled entities. He uses no pain or anxiety medication, and prescribes no antibiotics before or after surgery. Patients reportedly don’t need them–and don’t bleed from the physical surgery.
Joao’s amazing work has been documented by university studies in Brazil, research teams from around the world, and stories in a handful of trade books. Visiting doctors, trained in conventional medicine, are invited to stand near Joao as he does surgery and are stunned; “There is an energy generated… which is very real and effective in healing,” notes Dr. Frank Salvatore, a Board-certified urologist visiting the Casa from New Jersey. “If the developed countries want to be leaders in health care, we need to take a closer look at Spiritist healing.”
The book includes many testimonials from patients, photographs and diagrams of the Center, travel information about visitiing the Casa, a glossary of terms and a detailed diary of one couple’s day-to-day experience while receiving healing.
John of God and the community of the Casa are living demonstrations of spiritual healing in a most dramatic form. “Witnessing the work at the Casa has opened my mind to new possibilities in healing and health maintenance,” states Bragdon. “I hope that this book will encourage further discussion here in the United States about stretching the boundaries of our understanding of healing modalities that are still yet to be fully utilized by Western medicine.”
Editorial Reviews
“This book should be given to every medical student throughout the world”.–Johann Grobler,MD, psychiatrist from South Africa
Reader Reviews
I found the book to be very informative and a joy to read. — Steve Van Dusen
This is the first book I had read by the author, but since have ordered another. She is an excellent writer and treats her subject (Brazilian Spiritism and the Casa) with insight and passionate interest. I think anyone considering a trip to John of God or any of the spiritual centers in Brazil would find this book of interest.–Phyllo
Rarely does a book sear the soul with the mark of truth like Spiritual Alliances has touched mine. Indeed, just having finished reading Emma Bragdon’s landmark publication for the second time, I wish to share my thoughts with others about this book that has had such a profound effect on my life perspective.
A story about Joao Teixeira da Faria, a/k/a John of God, a spiritual healer in Brazil who regularly helps cure people of such extreme health problems as cancer, AIDS, heart disease, blindness, and paralysis, Spiritual Alliances is at once both fascinating and disturbing.–Rob Macomber