About the Author

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor in and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University. He is the author of Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna and Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"[Kripal's] trademark mix of autobiography and rigorous scholarship gives his writings a style all their own. His irenic style matches his approach: he reaches out to all sides rather than setting one side against another. . . . In any future course on the study of religions, I would assign The Serpent's Gift."--Robert A. Segal "History of Religions"

"A trickster-guide, Jeffrey Kripal lures his readers through mirrored doors and ironic tunnels into the inner chambers of the study of religion. There he conducts a disconcerting initiation. The mysteries of his religious studies are an antidote to the imperial certainty, the bombastic piety, of too much religion. This shimmering serpent gives with its fangs."--Mark D. Jordan, Asa Griggs Candler Professor, Emory University--Mark D. Jordan (7/18/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"In The Serpent's Gift, Jeffrey Kripal provocatively advances a practice he names 'academic gnosticism.' Through such a method, he seeks to move beyond some of the obstinate binaries that have preoccupied, and sometimes thwarted, scholars of religion. This lively, accessible, and delightfully transgressive book also explores how the academic study of religion itself is implicated in, indeed emerges out of, some of the heretical subject matters it tries objectively to understand. In making conscious a culturally repressed, religious unconscious by means of his 'mystical humanism, ' Kripal has once again succeeded in getting students of religion to think about (and with) old things in new and daring ways."--Jeremy Zwelling, Wesleyan University--Jeremy Zwelling (7/18/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"[Kripal's] trademark mix of autobiography and rigorous scholarship gives his writings a style all their own. His irenic style matches his approach: he reaches out to all sides rather than setting one side against another. . . . In any future course on the study of religions, I would assign The Serpent's Gift."--Robert A. Segal "History of Religions"

"A trickster-guide, Jeffrey Kripal lures his readers through mirrored doors and ironic tunnels into the inner chambers of the study of religion. There he conducts a disconcerting initiation. The mysteries of his religious studies are an antidote to the imperial certainty, the bombastic piety, of too much religion. This shimmering serpent gives with its fangs."--Mark D. Jordan, Asa Griggs Candler Professor, Emory University

"In The Serpent's Gift, Jeffrey Kripal provocatively advances a practice he names 'academic gnosticism.' Through such a method, he seeks to move beyond some of the obstinate binaries that have preoccupied, and sometimes thwarted, scholars of religion. This lively, accessible, and delightfully transgressive book also explores how the academic study of religion itself is implicated in, indeed emerges out of, some of the heretical subject matters it tries objectively to understand. In making conscious a culturally repressed, religious unconscious by means of his 'mystical humanism, ' Kripal has once again succeeded in getting students of religion to think about (and with) old things in new and daring ways."--Jeremy Zwelling, Wesleyan University