Experiencing Relativity

This session explores the weird temporalities encountered in the province of religious studies, broadly conceived. What happens to the practice of history when we allow time to start looking a little... weird? When we take seriously experiences of time that include precognition and what might be summarily “explained away” as coincidence? [According to our speaker, many of our analytic frameworks and presumptions begin to fall away.]

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he co-hosts the Archives of the Impossible collection and conference series. He also co-directs the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Jeff is the author of numerous books, most recently How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (Chicago, 2024). He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the sciences, modern esoteric literature, and the hidden history of science fiction collectively entitled The Super Story: Science (Fiction) and Some Emergent Mythologies. His full body of work can be seen at http://jeffreyjkripal.com. He thinks he may be Spider-Man.

Moderation:
Nandita Badami