She Blinded Me With Science

Reason writers around town: At The Washington Post, I review Randall Sullivan's The Miracle Detective, a Medjugorje memoir by a talented true-crime writer.

Comments

[Dan]

If anything, you're too kind to this nonsense.

[Tim Cavanaugh]

I've got a few (ok, more than a few) Medjugorje believers among my friends and family members, so I try to be kind. Still, I can't beat this feeling that Fatima knocks all other Marian apparitions into a cocked hat.

[Randall Sullivan]

Kind? Hardly. I mind less that your review was obtuse and petty than that it was dishonest. Case in point: You state that the views of skeptics generally get "short shrift," then illustrate this point by observing that, "the growing skepticism of a priest who began as a fervent Medjugorje supporter strikes the author as 'like the progress of a disease.'" How would the readers of review have interpreted this if they had known (as you did from reading the book) that this "skeptic" was a priest who had never stopped believing that the apparitions were real, but had decided that they were a product of the devil posing as the Virgin Mary, and that this same priest had been described by his superiors in the U.S. as mentally ill. The problem, you preening twerp, is that you distort the facts in this while standing on a claim of rationality and scientific integrity. I call that contemptible.

[Janet]

I had certainly been a lapsed Christian for 35 years, believing only in "reason". I will be forever grateful to Randall Sullivan for writing The Miracle Detective and thus prodding me to begin researching this for myself. I can't get past the acknowledgement that if even one event he chronicles is truly spiritual then we had best all be doing some homework on this.

Regards,
Janet Early