3 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Jeff Kripal's 2011 study of American superhero comics as secular expressions of religious and paranormal experience — arguing that comics authors like Jack Kirby, Alan Moore, and Stan Lee drew on their own anomalous experiences to create characters (X-Men mutants, Dr. Manhattan, Silver Surfer) that encode genuine mystical insight.
Jeff Kripal's 2022 manifesto arguing that the humanities need to take seriously the anomalous experiences that have always been their primary subject — and that doing so requires expanding the humanities into what Kripal calls the 'superhumanities' where consciousness, paranormal experience, and academic rigor converge.
Jeff Kripal's 2021 book examining accounts of levitation in Christian mystical tradition and other cultures — arguing that the body's participation in mystical states has been documented across multiple independent traditions and cannot be dismissed as mere legend.