> Skip to content
  • Published: 2 January 2018
  • ISBN: 9780143109501
  • Imprint: Tarcher
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $35.00

The Super Natural

Why the Unexplained Is Real



Now in paperback: Go way down the rabbit hole with two of today's most thrilling and intellectually serious explorers of the unexplained to discover why the paranormal is real.

Two of today's maverick authors on anomalous experience present a perception-altering and intellectually thrilling analysis of why the paranormal is real, but radically different from what is conventionally
understood.

Whitley Strieber (Communion) and Jeffrey J. Kripal (J. Newton Rayzor professor of religion 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.

  • Published: 2 January 2018
  • ISBN: 9780143109501
  • Imprint: Tarcher
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $35.00

Praise for The Super Natural

"A cohesive reframing of the 'pantheon of the unknown' ... A thought-provoking, intelligent reconceptualization of supernatural events." --Kirkus Reviews

"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."
--The New York Times

Kirkus Reviews