Jeffrey J. Kripal and Host Michael Lerner
In part 5 of this series, Host Michael Lerner talks with author Jeffrey Kripal about his book The Serpent’s Gift—Reflections on the Study of Religion. The book is a provocative call for a complete reorientation of religious studies—a reversal of the Adam and Eve story—aimed at a larger understanding of the world, the self, and the divine. He considers Feuerbach’s Gnosticism, the untapped mystical potential of comparative religion, and even the modern mythology of the X-Men.
Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. In this series, Jeffrey talks with Host Michael Lerner about his body of work—more than 13 groundbreaking books about the mystical and the erotic, the relationship of mind and matter, and parapsychological phenomena.
Michael has been reading, talking, and meeting with Jeffrey for more than a year now, immersing himself in the consciousness worldview that Jeffrey presents in his books and teaching. Follow Michael’s journey through these conversations.
Jeffrey J. Kripal
Jeffrey is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he also hosts the Archives of the Impossible collection and conference series. He co-directs the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and sits on numerous advisory boards in the United States and Europe involving the nature of consciousness and the human, social, and natural sciences. Most recently, Jeff is the author of The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (Chicago 2022), where he intuits an emerging order of knowledge that can engage in robust moral criticism but also affirm the superhuman or nonhuman dimensions of our histories and futures; and How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (Chicago 2024), which thinks—with experiencers of the extreme–toward a future form of theory that does not separate the mental and the material. His full body of work can be seen at jeffreyjkripal.com. He thinks he may be Spider-Man.
Michael Lerner
Host
Michael is the president and co-founder of Commonweal. His principal work at Commonweal is with the Cancer Help Program, CancerChoices.org, the Omega Resilience Projects, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and The New School at Commonweal. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for contributions to public health in 1983 and is author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Therapies (MIT Press).
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