The Miracle Detective : An Investigation of Holy Visions

Rating:
Summary: Needs Editing
Review: This books starts out with real promise. Investiagting journalist who looks into a local Marian miracle ends up going to the Vatican and to Medjugorje, Bosnia.

There in Medjugorje he undergoes something of a conversion, meeting some of the visionaries and the saintly priest Fr Slavko.

However, the book descends into the mess of the authors life and the book becomes something of a self therapy session.

As if that weren't bad enough, he moves on from Medjugorje and looks at less authentic visions such as Scotsdale USA: lumping all these things together takes away from what should have been the thrust of the book: Medjugorje and the Vatican.

So in the end I wish that the book had been edited and cleaned up. I wouldn't reccomend this book to someone who is wanting to look at Medjugorje: for that, read a real professional investigative journalist's work, 'Spark from Heaven: the Mystery of the Madonna of Medjugorje' by Mary Craig.

Rating:
Summary: The Accidental Awakening of an Investigative Journalist
Review: What happens when, to his own surprise, an irreligious agnostic, ambivalently betrothed Rolling Stone contributing editor and savvy, irreverent investigative journalist finds himself saying to his publisher that his next book will be about the "miracle detectives" of the Vatican and the process of investigating holy visions and miracles? "You know what the third Secret of Fatima is, don't you?" one postmodern priest asks him with a sly smile. "The bill for the Last Supper."

"In its entire history, the Holy See has never recognized any apparition of the Virgin, not even at Lourdes or Fatima, Father Gumpel informed me during my first interview at the Vatican. This was something, the priest added, that even most Catholics did not know."

"Among the things I learned at the Vatican was that while [my] ignorance may be a crude facsimile of innocence, it enjoys many of the same advantages, the main one being that people want to educate you, and that in so doing, they inevitably disclose their deeper intentions. No less surprising, I found I was learning as much from those who shunned me as from those who drew me close. The doors shut in my face, the phone calls not returned, the claims that someone else was better qualified to answer such questions, and especially, the demands of confidentiality made by those willing to reveal a good deal about both the nature and the scale of conflict in the Holy See."

If you aren't aware of the increasing Marian apparitions and "miracles" happening around the world -- and especially of the political and other disturbing complexities in the ongoing apparitions in eternally war scarred Medjugorje, Bosnia-Hercegovina -- former intellectual existentialist Randall Sullivan is precisely the miracle detective to tell you all about them, Pope John Paul's amused glance and his own "accidental" gradual awakening. "Faith is no more the elimination of doubt than courage is the absence of fear." Eight years in the making, highly recommended reading for both skeptics -- "You should pray for the gift of discernment, Randall, because you need it tremendously" -- and believers alike. (Badly in need of the meticulous index this landmark work so seriously deserves and sadly full of editorial and proofreading typos and fact checking errors -- thus, very regrettably, four not five stars.)

Rating:
Summary: Apparitional Mysteries
Review: With the eye of an objective investigative reporter, and the heart of a natural "mystic", Sullivan takes us on a tour of believable mystical experiences both here and abroad. Moreover, Sullivan is a gifted writer, as a contributing editor of both Rolling Stones Magazine, and Men's Journal.

Starting--briefly--with a "vision" in a trailer in eastern Oregon, the author devotes the bulk of his book to Medjugorje, in the former Yugoslavia, where the author spent over forty days being slowly "converted" to the Catholic dispensation (although he has still not formally converted, his children are baptized in the Catholic Church).

The author readily concedes that he experienced the "mystical" during his first trip to Medjugorje; although a subsequent trip proved more disappointing (the author alludes to the fact that, perhaps, he had had his fill of grace on the first trip).

The author delves into the multitude of scientific tests which have been conducted in Medjugorje which have found the children-now adults--some of who are still allegedly seeing the Blessed Virgin Mary some twenty-four years after the first 'apparition'--completely normal, sane, and not manipulated. In fact, these 'seers', 'visionaries' or whatever you want to call them, adopted their positions reluctantly, as you will learn in this book.

These scientific tests reveal, in short, that these "visionaries" seem to be seeing the exact same "image" (of our Blessed Virgin Mary) at the same time, and that words said or images previewed were not choreographed beforehand. In other words, these individuals were proven to have seen and heard the same thing simultaneously, without prior manipulation. Wow!!

This author closes with apparitions which were alleged to have occurred in Scottsdale, Arizona, and then immigrated to Pennsylvania. He consulted with experts both at the Vatican and in the United States.

This book can be enjoyed by the skeptic and true-believer alike. This book is astonishingly well-written, and published by the Atlantic Monthly (known for over a hundred years, at least in its magazine form, to print only the most accomplished pieces).

Read and enjoy!!