Matthew C. McGuire's Blog

Localized Grace: The “Linger Effect” and “Spiritually Charged” Relics

Stories of miracles associated with religious relics and holy locations often smack of medieval superstition and pious credulity. Bones of saints, fragments of the “true cross,” and shrines of saints all have a reputation as fonts of the miraculous, particularly within Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox popular piety. Many of us might be prone to dismiss such reports—dramatic healings being the most common—as little more than placebo effects underwritten by wish-fulfillment.

Others, more familia...

Matthew's Digest - Summer 2025

For those readers who have recently subscribed, I send out a newsletter 2 or 3 times per year to highlight my recent work and media engagement. As always, I am ever appreciative of your engagement and feedback.

Public Engagement

In late March I was invited by my friend and colleague Merrill Greene to deliver a speech on Christian engagement with New Age spirituality at Kingswood University in New Brunswick, Canada. I offered a threefold focus on “Meaning,” “Power,” and “Holiness” for introducing t...

St. Augustine Reports a Near-Death Experience

Back in 2023, as I was scouring through St. Augustine’s corpus in search of his opinion on ghosts, saints, and afterlife communications, I stumbled upon a curious anecdote in his De Cura Pro Mortuis Gerenda (On the Care to be Had for the Dead).1

In Section 12[15], Augustine recounts what seems to be, by modern standards, a bona fide Near-Death Experience (NDE). I briefly mention this in a footnote in Chapter 7 of A Magical World. In this essay, however, we will take a closer look at this ostensib...

Telepathic Overlay in Hypnosis

This article is a continuation of my previous one on Michael Newton’s Journey of Souls and Past Life Regression (PLR) therapy.

Having discussed the contaminating role of confabulation and cryptomnesia in the context of Michael Newton’s PLR therapy, I will now move onto a further (and more interesting) factor which complicates his findings. Before I do, however, we will need to briefly discuss some history behind the US Government’s Remote Viewing program.

Between the 1970’s and the 1990’s, the US ...

Confabulating Reincarnation

At the suggestion of a friend, I recently completed Michael Newton’s Journey of Souls. This is a classic text in the New Age genre, as evidenced by the 800,000 copies sold and the glowing endorsement written by Shirley MacLaine.1 In this seminal book, the late Newton, a hypnotherapist, leads his clients through his modality of past life regression (PLR).

One of the more unique aspects of Newton’s practice is that he goes beyond the typical PLR therapy—a practice that gained notoriety with the in...

Parallels in Non-Christian Healing

In previous writings, I have compared some of the common touch points between ESP and the “gift of prophecy” as it is practiced in Pentecostal-Charismatic circles. My operating hypothesis throughout has been to see both the Christian and non-Christian versions of this “gift” as operating according to the same mechanism, while the religious significance can vary depending on the context or purported origin of the ability.

As part of my studies at the Rhine Education Center, I was recently tasked w...

C.S. Lewis on Ghosts: An Anthology

In the “Ghosts” Appendix to A Magical World, I related the alleged apparition of the freshly deceased C.S. Lewis to New Testament scholar J.B. Phillips, in addition to Lewis’ own remarks about experiencing the presence of his late wife. I further cited some key passages from The Great Divorce to suggest that Lewis may have tacitly recognized a temporary ghostly existence as one possibility of the status animarum post mortem, as he once called it.1

A spectral daydream, circa 1947

The present articl...

Matthew's Digest - Winter 2025

To those who have recently subscribed, thank you! I send out a periodic newsletter every few months so that readers can be apprised (or reminded) of my recent podcast appearances, essays, and other media engagement.

Recent Podcasts

Since my previous newsletter in early October 2024, I’ve had the privilege of appearing on six podcasts:

Myths, Mysteries, & Majesty with Nikola Hristov

For those interested in an outline of A Magical World as a whole, this is probably the single most comprehensive interv...

Faking Prophecy in the Church

Though I don’t typically write on current events, the recent exposure of Shawn Bolz for using “data mining” to fake prophetic abilities deserves some comment, particularly as I mention him a handful of times in A Magical World.

For those unfamiliar with Bolz, he is a figure who has made a reputation for himself through the Charismatic “gift of prophecy.” More specifically, he has been known to operate in what is commonly termed a “word of knowledge,” whereby the Holy Spirit ostensibly reveals hid...

Reflections on the Gateway Process Document

The following article will be a little different than usual, and regular readers may decide to pass on this one. Instead of an essay making any specific claims, I am here simply remarking on a document that has been brought to my attention by a number of my friends and colleagues engaged in the field of parapsychology and remote viewing. The following will contain some speculation and “connecting the dots,” but it should not be read as me taking a firm position on any of the ideas.1

The document ...