They cast out demons, speak in tongues, see visions and heal people using their hands.

At Saint Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church & Student Center, 2210 Lincoln Way, Thursday night charismatic prayer meetings are not the typical liturgy.

Across the street in the Memorial Union on Tuesday nights and Sunday afternoons, Body of Christ Christian Worship Center (BCC), a multi-cultural gospel church, is practicing similar beliefs.

Catholic or Protestant, black or white, the underlying connection between these charismatic groups is their practice of “spiritual gifts.”

Robert Horton, 44, professor of soil physics, regularly attends the charismatic prayer group at St. Thomas Aquinas. Horton said he has witnessed a blind girl receive sight, a deaf man hear and a woman curl back her lips, bare her teeth and growl.

Toran Smith, 33, pastor of the BCC, said he, too, has observed the supernatural.

“In studying scripture and obeying the word of God, gifts started activating in the members,” he said.

Horton said he also rebukes evil spirits.

He said possessed individuals often respond by “suddenly shrieking out of control” or “falling on the ground and rolling all over.”

Hector Avalos, assistant religion professor, said he has seen similar incidents.

“The person would act in a wild manner and then calm down after a while,” he said.

Prior to becoming an atheist, Avalos was a Pentecostal preacher.

“I was a faith healer and spoke in tongues when I was a believer,” Avalos said.

He described the phenomenon as a “semi-hallucinatory experience.”

“The most powerful time came in my baptism. I saw a light coming through my head,” he said. “The light approached me, entered my head and my tongue started moving. It lasted for five or 10 seconds, and then I came back into the real world.”

Norman A. Scott, associate professor of psychology, said speaking in tongues is a “culturally-sanctioned phenomena” that is not diagnosed as abnormal or psychotic behavior if it occurs within a religious context.

Horton noted three types of speaking in tongues.

One is for a believer’s “personal prayer life,” he said, “… especially when we feel moved to pray, but we don’t know exactly what to pray, so we pray in a heavenly language.”

He said another kind serves as a prophetic message of God to the church; the third kind of tongue is an earthly language, not understood by the speaker, but understood by native speakers.

Horton said once a lady visiting from Lebanon attended one of their meetings. One member, against the group’s consensus, spoke in tongues at one point during the meeting. Later, they asked if it had bothered her.

Horton said she responded, “‘No, I understood what you said. You spoke in the same dialect of my block in Beirut. It was a message that God was speaking to me.'”

Avalos considers speaking in tongues as a muscle spasm induced by extreme fervor.

“From a scientific perspective, it’s nothing more than involuntary movement of sounds — a muscle spasm of the tongue that comes with excitement,” he said.

Jeff Dodge, director of the Salt Company and Pastor of Cornerstone Church, 315 Sixth St., is skeptical about the applicability of speaking in tongues in today’s society.

“I think that most of the Christians that claim to have the gift of tongues are sincere and devoted Christians, but what they are practicing seems to be very different than what is recorded in Acts chapter two,” Dodge said. “God has always done the miraculous, but I believe there was a power available to the apostolic ministry that is not available to us today.”