468 Touching the Supernatural (Dale Allison)

Renowned Historical Jesus Scholar and Princeton Theological Seminary Professor, Dale Allison's life changed forever when he was just sixteen years old. In fact, he has chronicled nine profound spiritual experiences throughout his life. These extraordinary moments of transcendence led him to a comparative study to learn more about what is happening to people all around the world in our time. The result? A book that catalogues and describes weird encounters with angels in white, sudden terminal lucidity, near death experiences, and even encounters with evil spiritual entities. This is not the typical sort of book written by someone who has made a career of scholarship within a guild that generally prefers naturalism and reductionism to the miraculous or inexplicable. Nonetheless, now tenured and sitting atop a mountain of published successes--and without concern about his career--Professor Allison feels free to explore his own numinal episodes as well as those of a staggering number of others--most of whom keep such experiences to themselves.

Listen to this episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

https://youtu.be/H4_ZSJH6SRs

—— Links ——

• Get the book we discussed, Encountering Mystery
• For more about Dale Allison, see his books on Amazon
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• Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio Library.
• Who is Sean Finnegan?  Read his bio here

—— Questions ——

1. You begin your book by telling three personal experiences of the transcendent. Were you worried what people would think about you as a distinguished scholar of Jesus and the New Testament, especially among the more secular-minded elements in the academy?
2. You remark on the difficulty of acquiring accurate statistics on mystical experiences because people tend to keep their encounters private. Why is that?
3. And yet, they seem to be increasing, or at least reported more (see p. 21)
4. You talk about a small piece of paper that you keep in your desk draw that chronicles nine experiences you've had between 1979 and 1999. Do you think it's important for people to maintain their memories of extraordinary events?
5. Honestly, your little piece of paper reminded me of Blaise Pascal's night of fire. He sowed it into his house jacket and it was only discovered after he died.
6. Why do you think there's so much shame a