Reality Is Strange

In the academic sphere of the history of religion, there are two “elephants in the room.” Both are set on trampling the discipline to death, but neither are truly acknowledged. The first is the disbelief of many scholars of religion, veiled and softened by a postmodernist refusal to accord definitive meaning to anything. The second is the fact that other scholars of religion are themselves believers who often sedulously avoid the appearance of faith commitments lest they be considered unfit to make historical judgements. As a result, fundamental questions that come easily to the non-academic—questions like “Does God exist?,” “Is revelation true?,” or “Are supernatural phenomena real?”—get short shrift among historians of religion. There is a growing movement in the discipline, however, to get a conversation started about ontological reality. These scholars reject the orthodoxy of recent decades that approached every phenomenon as culturally constructed and shunted ultimate questions into the realm of the unaskable. Jeffrey Kripal is one such scholar, and How to Think Impossibly is his latest contribution to a bold effort to grapple with the notion that people who experience the impossible might actually be telling the truth.