Jeffrey J. Kripal


Jeffrey John Kripal is an American college professor. He is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
His work includes the study of comparative erotics and ethics in mystical literature, American countercultural translations of Asian religions, and the history of Western esotericism from gnosticism to New Age religions.

Scholarly Impact

''Kali's Child''

Kripal's 1995 book Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna was a study of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna. The book was a psychoanalytic study arguing that Ramakrishna's mystical experiences involved a strong homoerotic dimension. The book won the American Academy of Religion's History of Religions Prize for the Best First Book of 1995. A second, revised edition was published in 1998. The book has been dogged by controversy ever since its initial publication in 1995. The book's claims have been questioned by the scholars and Alan Roland, and members of the Ramakrishna Mission, often on the grounds of translation errors. However, Bengal scholar Brian Hatcher has defended Kripal's translations.

''Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion''

In 2007 The University of Chicago Press released Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Kripal's account of the Esalen Institute, the retreat center and think-tank located in Big Sur, California. Writing in the Journal of American History, Catherine Albanese called it "a highly personal account that is also a superb historiographical exercise and a masterful work of analytical cultural criticism."

''Authors of the Impossible''

Kripal's 2011 book traces the history of psychic phenomena over the last two centuries. The book profiles four writers: the British psychical researcher F. W. H. Myers, the American anomalist writer and humorist Charles Fort, the astronomer, computer scientist, and ufologist Jacques Vallee, and the French philosopher Bertrand Méheust.

Chronicle of Higher Education

In a March 2014 article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Visions of the Impossible", Kripal cited Mark Twain, who wrote that a dream about his brother's death appeared to come true in detail a few weeks later. Kripal writes that
The professional debunker's insistence, then, that the phenomena play by his rules and appear for all to see in a safe and sterile laboratory is little more than a mark of his own ignorance of the nature of the phenomena in question.

Kripal's article was criticized by Jerry Coyne in The New Republic as "the latest anti-science argument."

Criticism

Businessman Rajiv Malhotra has questioned the view and approach Kripal takes in Kali's Child, alongside the approach taken by many other scholars of India. In his book, Malhotra's criticisms are primarily based on the work of Swami Tyagananda.
As a result of criticisms like Malhotra's, Kripal was among a group of scholars receiving death threats and physical attacks from Hindus offended by his portrayals. He shifted his research focus away from Hinduism afterward, claiming, “I stuck with it and responded as best as I could for about six or seven years. It just wore me down after a while. At some point I felt like it wasn’t worth it anymore, that it was starting to affect my health. I couldn’t go anywhere, any conference or anything, without having to deal with the thought police, as it were.”

Books authored