Jeffrey John Kripal (born 1962) is an American college professor. He is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. 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. Scholarly Impact Kali's Child Kripal's 1995 book Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna was a study of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna. The book was a psychoanalytic study arguing that Ramakrishna's mystical experiences involved a strong homoerotic dimension. The book won the American Academy of Religion's History of Religions Prize for the Best First Book of 1995. A second, revised edition was published in 1998. The book has been dogged by controversy ever since its initial publication in 1995. The book's claims have been questioned by the scholars and Alan Roland, and members of the Ramakrishna Mission (Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana), often on the grounds of translation errors. However, Bengal scholar Brian Hatcher has defended Kripal's translations. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion 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." Authors of the Impossible Kripal's 2011 book 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. Chronicle of Higher Education In a March 2014 article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Visions of the Impossible", Kripal cited Mark Twain, who wrote that a dream about his brother's death appeared to come true in detail a few weeks later. Kripal writes that The professional debunker's insistence, then, that the phenomena play by his rules and appear for all to see in a safe and sterile laboratory is little more than a mark of his own ignorance of the nature of the phenomena in question. Kripal's article was criticized by Jerry