Hey, TT Book listeners. It's Anne here with a podcast special. This is part of a collaboration with the LA review of books, a conversation on the edge. And in this case, the edge of belief.

Where all the weird stuff we can't explain lives. Or maybe I should say hides.

You know, the classic case was somebody would wake up in the middle of the night and they would

see grandma or a child at the foot of the bed waving goodbye or dripping wet or something.

And they would find out the next day or a couple days later that grandma or the child had

died or drowned at more or less exactly that time.

This is Jeff Krepple, a highly originally even maverick historian of religion,

a guy who is building a connection between the mystical and the paranormal. Criple mines the backwaters and undercurrents of religion.

He collects stories of precognitive dreams, near-death experiences, and alien abductions.

The kind of experiences most people would not even consider

calling religious. But then his view of Christianity is on the unorthodox side. He talks about

the homoerotic and very queer roots of Catholicism. This is from a guy who once studied to be a monk.

His interest in the erotic origins of religion launched and later scuttled, his academic career as a scholar of Hindu mysticism.

And then he discovered the Assyllin Institute,

ground zero for the human potential movement

and a launching pad for people who like to question the scientific

paradigm for how we understand spiritual experiences. So Cripple has a new book out. It's called

Secret Body, and it weaves together these various strands of his work, partly a memoir. It's also

a subversive reinterpretation of religion, all of which made Steve Paulson intensely curious.

Jeff, at the very beginning of your book, you say the unvarnished truth is that things have been very trippy.

And I have to say that is the kind of thing I might expect to hear from somebody who's taking a lot of hallucinogens, but not from a scholar of religion. Is that a comment about your own life? Or do you think of religion itself as trippy? Well, religion is trippy. I mean, the only reason we think it's not trippy is because we've grown too accustomed to our own religious worldview.

I mean, all we have to do is step out of that worldview and look at another religion, and it looks like a psychedelic trip.

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