John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing by Cristina Rocha (review)

The New Age has always been global, both in its networks of practice and its imaginaries. Its globe, however, has not rotated on a balanced axis. It wobbles to the history of colonial imbalances from which its practitioners contacted, sampled, and consumed the sacred worlds of the colonied. But as globaliation has transformed the relationships between cultural consumer and culturally-consumed, religious sensibilities from the Global South have likewise influenced the New Age. João Teixeira de Faria (b. 1942), known as João de Deus, or John of God in the Anglophone world, is a bellwether for this transformation. From a lower-class, rural background, he has infused Brazilian Spiritist healing into the global New Age, extending even to the broader media networks of the spiritual-but-not-religious.

Cristina Rocha's John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing will be the definitive work on this subject. It is clearly written, erudite, and rooted in a singular research program. It is also timely in the most ignominious of ways. Police in Abadiânia arrested João de Deus in December 2018 on sexual assault charges. His accusers number in the hundreds and their experiences span decades. The book went to press long before his arrest, however, and any traces of impropriety do not appear in its pages. This should in no way detract from the quality of Rocha's research, which is superb.

John of God reflects a decade of ethnographic fieldwork by its author. This included extensive access to the core community at Abadiânia and to the healer himself. The book portrays the medium João de Deus, along with his petitioners, as constructing a community around a unique blend of Brazilian healing practices. Rocha explains the process succinctly: João de Deus' healing gives people a "radical experience of the sacred" that provides hope beyond conventional medicine while cementing a sense of community (8–9). The group expands because of its symbolic affinity with the global New Age and alternative medicine, generating a religious comprehensibility that crosses cultures. The author's central thesis is that this process and its network operate together to "resacralize" late modernity (5). This argument pulls together the incredible detail recounted throughout the work.

Rocha's analysis unfolds across seven chapters, each anchored to a core argument that is stated explicitly at the outset. The first two chapters describe the author's relationship with João de Deus and to his movement's position in the Brazilian religious arena. The third chapter delves into the core practice of Spiritist healing as João de Deus has adapted it in the "Casa"—the particular community at Abadiânia. The fourth and fifth chapters assess the cultural contact that arises in the space of rural Abadiânia and then the industry of spiritual tourism. These chapters, in particular, contain some of the most useful insights into how New Age thinking transcends national boundaries. The final chapters demonstrate the great achievement of the author's research program. They trace the flow of ideas and practices through individuals from the Casa into the satellite communities in the Global North. Each chapter contains extensive ethnographic detail with frequent pauses tying those details to other scholars. The only major critique I would level relates to this point. The author fixates on her theoretical interlocutors. But in my estimation, Rocha's own analysis surpasses her interlocutors in both depth of knowledge and insight.

It is a joy to watch important intellectual agendas develop across a scholar's body of work. John of God continues Cristina Rocha's project of recalibrating our understanding of transnational religion by showing "that global flows do not emanate solely from the Global North" (5). It should be required reading for scholars of new religious movements, especially those attentive to their transnational dimensions. The book's ideal setting would be graduate anthropology and religion classes. I would...