Join Host Michael Lerner in conversation with Jeffrey J. Kripal, Rice University Department of Religion professor and author of more than a dozen books including The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities and The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge.

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.

Host Michael Lerner

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).