Most scholars dismiss research into the paranormal as
pseudoscience, a frivolous pursuit for the paranoid or gullible.
Even historians of religion, whose work naturally attends to events
beyond the realm of empirical science, have shown scant interest in
the subject. But the history of psychical phenomena, Jeffrey J.
Kripal contends, is an untapped source of insight into the sacred
and by tracing that history through the last two centuries of
Western thought we can see its potential centrality to the critical
study of religion.
Kripal grounds his study in the work of four major figures in the
history of paranormal research: psychical researcher Frederic
Myers; writer and humorist Charles Fort; astronomer, computer
scientist, and ufologist Jacques Vallee; and philosopher and
sociologist Bertrand Meheust. Through incisive analyses of these
thinkers, Kripal ushers the reader into a beguiling world somewhere
between fact, fiction, and fraud. The cultural history of
telepathy, teleportation, and UFOs; a ghostly love story; the
occult dimensions of science fiction; cold war psychic espionage;
galactic colonialism; and the intimate relationship between
consciousness and culture all come together in "Authors of the
Impossible," a dazzling and profound look at how the paranormal
bridges the sacred and the scientific.
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