I used to watch his show. I did not find him to be a gimmick. He wasn’t telling people’s future, he told them things from their past. I know people don’t believe it and say that they must have told him things, but some of the things he came out with were just too minute for anyone to have even consider asking about before hand so that he could say it later.
The problem in this thread is that you have Catholics who have never been exposed to the ‘true gifts of the Church and the Holy Spirit’ which are used for the Church and the building up of the Church, PONTIFICATING on these things they really know nothing about. This is essentially the shortcoming of the
Catholic.com forums. Too many people sharing opinions without real knowledge.
Time and time again, gifts that are misused, not used for building up the Church and its members, are taken away. Charging money or making profit, as in engaging in a psychic business, are not signs of gifts from God.
Being a member of the Charismatic Renewal and seeing countless priests blessed with spiritual gifts and also lay people(Catholics) who have these gifts also. One thing in common with all these things is that God always prepares the people he is going to use. He spiritually prepares them before they are used. He doesnt use ‘spiritual but not religious’ people. He uses his most devout people, not slackers, not people who say they used to be Catholic.
Nor does the Spirit/God have to ask us if there is someone whose name starts with a ‘M’.
Nor does TV shows get produced where 8 hours of taping for each segment is reduced to 1 hour so that the editing process takes out ‘ooops’ moments and the countless guesses and dead ends that go nowhere. Nor do gifted people, send out associates posing as audience members with tape recorders chatting up the people in line, or sit next to the audience, posing again, trying to find out things about them to be used as part of the show. Even at times, when things seem to be too real to be true, they are just part of a clever deception or at worst things within the realm of the devil. As the Bible and catechism states you are not to talk talk or conjure up the dead. No divination. And since John Edwards does state his profession as ‘psychic’ and ‘medium’ , he is not part of the Catholic Church and his stuff is to be avoided as per our faith.
Try attending a healing mass or many healing masses where gifted priests are at, if you want to see the real deal. Attend Church prayer groups wherethe gifted laity congregate. God sends his gifted souls to these prayer groups to help prepare others.
csicop.org/si/show/john_edward_hustling_the_bereaved/
“Cold Reading”
By contrast, today’s spirits-whom John Edward and his fellow mediums supposedly contact-seem to have poor memories and difficulty communicating. For example, in one of his on-air séances (on Larry King Live, June 19, 1998), Edward said: “I feel like there’s a J- or G-sounding name attached to this.” He also perceived “Linda or Lindy or Leslie; who’s this L name?” Again, he got a “Maggie or Margie, or some M-G-sounding name,” and yet again heard from “either Ellen or Helen, or Eleanore-it’s like an Ellen-sounding name.” Gone is the clear-speaking eloquence of yore; the dead now seem to mumble.
The spirits also seemingly communicate to Edward et al. as if they were engaging in pantomime. As Edward said of one alleged spirit communicant, in a Dateline “He’s pointing to his head; something had to affect the mind or the head, from what he’s showing me.” No longer, apparently, can the dead speak in flowing Victorian sentences, but instead are reduced to gestures, as if playing a game of charades.
One suspects, of course, that it is not the imagined spirits who have changed but rather the approach today’s mediums have chosen to employ. It is, indeed, a shrewd technique known as “cold reading"-so named because the subject walks in “cold"; that is, the medium lacks advance information about the person (Gresham 1953). It is an artful method of gleaning information from the sitter, then feeding it back as mystical revelation.
The “psychic” can obtain clues by observing dress and body language (noting expressions that indicate when one is on or off track), asking questions (which if correct will appear as “hits” but otherwise will seem innocent queries), and inviting the subject to interpret the vague statements offered. For example, nearly anyone can respond to the mention of a common object (like a ring or watch) with a personal recollection that can seem to transform the mention into a hit. (For more on cold reading see Gresham 1953; Hyman 1977; Nickell 2000.)
It should not be surprising that Edward is skilled at cold reading, an old fortunetelling technique. His mother was a “psychic junkie” who threw fortunetelling “house parties,” one of the alleged clairvoyants advising the then-fifteen-year-old that he had “wonderful psychic abilities.” He began doing card readings for friends and family, then progressed to psychic fairs where he soon learned that names and other “validating information” sometimes applied to the dead rather than the living. Eventually he changed his billing from “psychic” to “psychic medium” (Edward 1999). The revised approach set him on the road to stardom. In addition to his TV show, he now commands hundreds of dollars for a private reading and is booked two years in advance (Mui 2001).
and much more on warm reading and hot readings at the above posted link.
Yes, please DO read this. What you said in your post about this article is very misleading. He has been praying the rosary since his teens.He came up with the book independently but at the same time as his publisher. He did not want to promote the book because he said it was something people needed to find on their own. He did not refuse to promote it as you speculate.