Ebook: Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

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 h.;Acknowledgments; An Impossible Opening: The Magical Politics of Bobby Kennedy; Introduction: Off the Page; 1. The Book as Seance: Frederic Myers and the London Society for Psychical Research; 2. Scattering the Seeds of a Super-Story: Charles Fort and the Fantastic Narrative of Western Culture; 3. The Future Technology of Folklore: Jacques Vallee and the UFO Phenomenon; 4. Returning the Human Sciences to Consciousness: Bertrand Meheust and the Sociology of the Impossible; Conclusion: Back on the Page; Impossible (Dis)Closings: Two Youthful Encounters.