About

Paranormal Culture offers a space for thoughtful, nuanced, evidence-based thinking regarding paranormal phenomena. The paranormal (meaning beyond the normal) is everywhere in human history, and most human beings have at least one paranormal experience in their lifetime. At present, contemporary culture tends to reduce this dimension of human existence down to that which is terrifying, trivial, absurd, impossible, merely fanciful, or limit it to what one religion or another teaches. But, as the fictional mathematician, Ian Malcolm, in the first Jurassic Park film, said regarding biological life, that it “always finds a way,” so too the paranormal. It always finds the cracks in any worldview, regardless how rigid and calcified, manifesting as anomalous experiences that stubbornly defy any ordinary categorization or explanation. And Paranormal Culture exists for the sole purpose of investigating these cracks in our prevailing worldviews, and speculating as to what Reality would have to be like for such phenomena to occur.

The term Superhumanities refers to an emerging paradigm in academic thought, lead by some of the most creative and insightful thinkers of our time, which re-imagines the study of religion, history, anthropology, psychology, politics, all the arts, social sciences and even physical sciences, really, such that the sorts of paranormal phenomena found everywhere in histories of all peoples can be put “back on the table” for serious study.That doesn’t mean debunking. Nor does it mean assuming that every anomalous experience and tale of the paranormal is factual. It means a sober, evidence-based approach to all sorts of phenomena commonly assumed, especially by the most educated, to be impossible (and so therefore unworthy of study, except perhaps as a study of “why people believe foolish things”). Ultimately, we imagine a day in which students flock to colleges and universities specifically to study The Superhumanities and all the paranormality that entails. In these Super-Universities of our near future, we would think together, creatively, proactively, cooperatively, about what Reality would have to be like in order for such phenomena to occur at all and how we might access the Super aspects of human nature in mending our world!