Jeff Kripal, who wrote the fantastic BB special feature "Psi-Fi: Popular Culture and the Paranormal," was recently interviewed by The Immanent Frame. Jeff is the chair of Rice University's Department of Religious Studies and author of an incredible book titled Authors of the Paranormal, that inspires me every time I reopen it, and the classic Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. His next book, Mutants and Mystics, about the intersections of science fiction, superhero comics, and the paranormal, is due out in October. From The Immanent Frame:
Most simply, "Authors of the Impossible" is an attempt to tell the story of how the technical categories of the psychical and the paranormal migrated from the academy, where they were carefully created and widely celebrated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, into popular culture and the media, where they now sit in intellectual disregard and confusion. The book is also an attempt to make sense of paranormal experiences from the perspective of the humanities. I read the paranormal as a semiotic event that plays out on both the mental/subjective and material/physical planes as a bridging sign or mediating story between two orders of experience: one conscious and constructed, the other not. Such a project, of course, violates our Cartesian epistemologies involving an interior, solipsistic, illusory subject looking out onto a real but dead, indifferent, and inert objective world ruled entirely by math and mechanism. It is this same useful Cartesian mistake that renders such events “impossible,” even though they happen all the time…
I don’t believe anything. And I believe everything. I am not being evasive or cute here. I am being precise. I don’t believe anything, in the sense that I think religious experiences are symbolic or semiotic–speakings across a gap, as it were–and so should not be taken literally, ever. I believe everything, in the sense that I think that extreme religious experiences express, through image, symbol, and myth, some revelation of the real, some very dramatic contact with the sacred, always, of course, filtered and constructed through the body-brain in a particular place and time.
"Reading the paranormal writing us: an interview with Jeffrey Kripal" (Thanks, Jody Radzik!)
