Jeffrey J. Kripal

Jeffrey John Kripal (born 1962) is an American religious studies scholar. He is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. While chairman of the Religion Department at Rice, he helped found their "GEM" program, with a doctoral concentration in "Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism".

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. Kripal is the founder of the Archives of the Impossible. A second, revised edition was published in 1998.

Kali's Child has been dogged by controversy ever since its initial publication in 1995. Its claims have been questioned by Alan Roland and other scholars, as well as members of the Ramakrishna Mission such as Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana. Translation errors have been a frequent target, although Bengal scholar Brian Hatcher has defended Kripal's translations. Rajiv Malhotra criticized Kripal (along with Wendy Doniger and many other scholars of India) in the book Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America.

Kripal has responded to the book's critics but shifted his research focus away from Hinduism afterward, saying, “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.”

Kripal's 2001 book Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism is a study of five religious studies scholars: Evelyn Underhill, Louis Massignon, R. C. Zaehner, Agehananda Bharati, and Elliot Wolfson. 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."

In the 2010s and 2020s Kripal turned his attention to the paranormal, releasing four scholarly volumes and three popular books (one coauthored with Whitley Strieber) on the subject. Authors of the Impossible (2011) 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. How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (2024) introduces the idea to ‘think-with’ the ‘experiencers’ of the paranormal as a means to treating them as genuine experiencers.

Archives of the Impossible The Archives of the Impossible at Rice University are a special collection founded in 2014 by Kripal.