John of God

Abstract

Abstract This is the first ethnographic account of the global spiritual movement headed by John of God, a Brazilian faith healer. In just over a decade, John of God has become an international healer superstar—visited by thousands of the desperately ill, the wealthy, celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Ram Daas, Wayne Dyer, and Shirley MacLaine, and an increasing array of media. What sets John of God apart are his spectacular healing methods. He performs operations using kitchen knives, scissors, and scalpels without anesthetics or asepsis. He allegedly takes on “entities” (spirits) in a trance and does not remember the operations when he becomes conscious again. Most people claim they do not feel pain and do not develop infections. Drawing on a decade of multi-sited fieldwork in Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand, Cristina Rocha provides a rich and important case study of religious globalization which embodies themes that are central to the spread and practice of faith and healing in the twenty-first century. Rocha explores the ways in which religion is both globalized and localized in late modernity and the strategies of cultural translation involved, the establishment of transnational communities of belief, the transformation of poor rural areas into sites of globalization, the efficacy of healing across cultures, the increasing appeal of traditional medicine in the West, and the prominent place of healing (of the body, the spirit, and the planet) in late modernity.