Chico Xavier
Referenced in 2 episodes
Definition
Brazilian medium (1910-2002) with only four years of schooling who reportedly produced about 500 books through psychography on topics ranging from history to psychiatry.
Related episodes
Life in Afterlife with Stafford Betty (4K Reboot)
New Thinking AllowedAug 27, 2026
Religion professor Stafford Betty discusses his novel The Afterlife Therapist, a fictional journey through the afterlife built on decades of research into spirit communications received through mediums. He describes an astral world much like our own, where the newly dead take on youthful bodies, choose unpaid work, and grow spiritually, while earthbound spirits and self-made shadow realms trap those bound by addiction. The conversation ranges from rescuing Henry VIII from a 500-year imaginary kingdom to competing souls choosing reincarnation and saints visiting from higher heavens.
The Spiritist View of Mental Disorders with Alexander Moreira-Almeida
New Thinking AllowedAug 23, 2026
Brazilian psychiatry professor Alexander Moreira-Almeida explains how Allan Kardec's 19th-century Spiritism holds that some mental disorders may stem from past-life memories or 'obsessing' discarnate spirits. In Brazil, dozens of psychiatric hospitals offer Spiritist therapies such as disobsession sessions with mediums and laying on of hands alongside conventional care. He also describes the first randomized controlled trial of these therapies and the criteria psychiatrists use to tell genuine mediumship apart from mental illness.