Jeffrey J. Kripal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jeffrey J. Kripal (Ph. D., University of Chicago, 1993) is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University, Houston, Texas. His areas of interest include the comparative erotics and ethics of mystical literature, American countercultural translations of Asian religions, and the history of Western esotericism from ancient gnosticism to the New Age.
Kripal's 1995 book Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna was a psychoanalytic study of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna. Kali's Child's primary thesis is that a great deal of Ramakrishna's mystical experiences were generated by the lingering results of childhood traumas, and sublimated homoerotic and pedophiliac passions. Kripal never claims that Sri Ramakrishna actually molested children. He argues that "Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences...were in actual fact profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic."[1] Kali's Child was received with acclaim by academics, but created controversy in India when it received a scathing review in The Statesman.
In 2003, Kripal wrote a foreword to The Knee of Listening, a book by American guru Adi Da. In it he said, referring to Da's writings:
In my opinion, this latter total corpus constitutes the most doctrinally thorough, the most philosophically sophisticated, the most culturally challenging, and the most creatively original literature currently available in the English language.[2]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, p. 2
- ^ Foreword by Jeffrey Kripal
[edit] Works
- Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago, 2007)
- On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture edited with Glenn W. Shuck (Indiana, 2005)
- Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West edited with Rachel Fell McDermott (California, 2003)
- Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status of Mysticism edited with G. William Barnard (Seven Bridges, 2002)
- Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago, 2001)
- Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism edited with T.G. Vaidyanathan (Oxford, 1999)
- Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago, 1995, 1998)
- The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006), 232 pp.
[edit] External links
- Interview with Jeffrey J. Kripal - small WORLD Podcast 2007
- An excerpt from Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.
