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Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

THE SUPER NATURAL

Jeffrey J. Kripal Whitley Strieber

A New Vision of the Unexplained

THE SUPER NATURAL is a revolutionary book—nothing like it has ever been attempted. In it, the most widely read figure in UFO and abduction literature and an internationally recognized professor of comparative literature explain how we can understand the paranormal as real without surrendering our critical faculties and honest questions.
Two of today's maverick authors on anomalous experience present a perception-altering and intellectually thrilling analysis of why the paranormal is real.

Whitley Strieber (Communion) and Jeffrey J. Kripal (chair of the department of Religious Studies at Rice University) team up on this unprecedented and intellectually vibrant new framing of inexplicable events and experiences.

Rather than merely document the anomalous, these authors--one the man who popularized alien abduction and the other a renowned scholar and "renegade advocate for including the paranormal in religious studies" (The New York Times)--deliver a fast-paced and exhilarating study of why the supernatural is neither fantasy nor fiction but a vital and authentic aspect of life.

Their suggestion? That all kinds of "impossible" things, from extra-dimensional beings to bilocation to bumps in the night, are not impossible at all: rather, they are a part of our natural world. But this natural world is immeasurably more weird, more wonderful, and probably more populated than we have so far imagined with our current categories and cultures, which are what really make these things seem "impossible."

The Super Natural considers that the natural world is actually a "super natural world"--and all we have to do to see this is to change the lenses through which we are looking at it and the languages through which we are presently limiting it. In short: The extraordinary exists if we know how to look at and think about it.

WHITLEY STRIEBER is one of today's most influential and bestselling authors of both science fiction and extraordinary fact. He is best known for his groundbreaking memoir Communion, which popularized the alien-abduction thesis, as well as his many bestselling novels, such as The Wolfen and The Hunger. These and other of Strieber's books have formed the basis for many popular movies, including The Day After Tomorrow.

JEFFREY J. KRIPAL is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion at Rice University. He is the author of six books, including Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred, and Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal.
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Book

Published 2016-02-02 by Tarcher

Book

Published 2016-02-02 by Tarcher

Comments

Practically anything goes at the American Academy of Religion's annual conference...What was almost impossible to find, at this orgy of intellectual curiosities, was discussion of the paranormal: ESP, premonitions, psychic powers, alien abduction and the like. This is a conference concerned with all sorts of supernatural and metaphysical claims....So why nothing about, say, mental telepathy? That is the question posed by Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University in Houston and a renegade advocate for including the paranormal in religious studies.

No matter your beliefs, Strieber's writing has impact.