{"id":7137,"date":"2004-06-17T09:31:00","date_gmt":"2004-06-17T09:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/the_miracle_detective.html"},"modified":"2004-06-17T09:31:00","modified_gmt":"2004-06-17T09:31:00","slug":"the_miracle_detective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/the_miracle_detective.html","title":{"rendered":"The Miracle Detective"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Godspy interview with Randall Sullivan,<\/a> author of the Miracle Detective<\/a>, which, to my great chagrin, I still have not read.<\/p>\n

Your description of your conversion experience really impressed me. It was clearly a genuine experience of God\u2019s love.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, I think that is the essence for me. I wouldn\u2019t understand the conversion to Christianity in any other way, personally. <\/p>\n

I was raised by a pair of athiests who took the Jesse Ventura view of religion\u2014that it is a crutch for the weak\u2014minded. Both my siblings are avowed athiests. I was never really comfortable with this; even as a child I sensed that there was a divine source. As a young adult I was more drawn to Eastern than to Western religion; the Hindu cosmology made more sense to me than the Christian one, and Buddhist beliefs accorded better with the scientific skepticism I had absorbed as a youth. What happened to me in Medjugorje was a kind of conversion experience. I had an experience of God’s mercy and of Christ’s sacrifice that was unprecedented in my life, and that I found myself unable to deny and unwilling to disavow even after I returned to my secular reality in the U.S.<\/p>\n

\n…Towards the end, you recount your meeting with Fr. Benedict Groeschel. How did he help clarify things for you? <\/strong><\/p>\n

What Father Groeschel did was validate my doubts without undermining my faith. It was almost as if he gave me permission to express my feeling that the events\u2014in Medjugorje, especially\u2014that I had found to be at once so moving and so perplexing were the complex mix of the human and the divine, of psychology and spirituality, that I imagined. What most surprised me about the aftermath of my meeting with him was the discovery that accepting my doubts actually deepened my faith. I felt a tremendous sense of liberation from the parameters I’d imposed on my belief.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Godspy interview with Randall Sullivan, author of the Miracle Detective, which, to my great chagrin, I still have not read. Your description of your conversion experience really impressed me. It was clearly a genuine experience of God\u2019s love. Yeah, I think that is the essence for me. I wouldn\u2019t understand the conversion to Christianity…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Miracle Detective - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/the_miracle_detective.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Miracle Detective - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A Godspy interview with Randall Sullivan, author of the Miracle Detective, which, to my great chagrin, I still have not read. Your description of your conversion experience really impressed me. It was clearly a genuine experience of God\u2019s love. Yeah, I think that is the essence for me. I wouldn\u2019t understand the conversion to Christianity…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/the_miracle_detective.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2004-06-17T09:31:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Miracle Detective - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/the_miracle_detective.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The Miracle Detective - Via Media","og_description":"A Godspy interview with Randall Sullivan, author of the Miracle Detective, which, to my great chagrin, I still have not read. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}