Jeffrey J. Kripal
Meet our founder and CFTI’s intellectual anchor… Jeff.
The Center for the Impossible is his brainchild.
He holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. A leading figure in the study of religion and a theorist of the superhumanities, he chaired the Department of Religion for eight years and served as Associate Dean of the School of the Humanities for four years. He also presently serves as Co-Director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute. Jeff is the author of numerous works exploring consciousness, culture, and the paranormal, including: The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, and New realities, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else, and the forthcoming trilogy, which begins with the first volume, out in the late summer of 2027, The Physics of Mystics: Thinking Impossibly after Religion and Science. His scholarship underpins much of the philosophical and cultural framework of the Center for the Impossible.
Learn more about his story through his personal website.
Jeff’s body of work…
“Why continue to tolerate a kind of armchair skepticism that has everything to do with scientistic propaganda and nothing at all to do with honest, rigorously open-minded collection, classification, and theory building, that is, with real science and real humanistic inquiry?”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal