Listening to the Snake; or, On Having a Spine

The western prohibition of reflection on what we call today religion begins not with a banned scholarly monograph or a taunted academic, but with a myth about a transgressive desire for mature moral knowledge and a subsequent sexual emotion, namely, Adam and Even\u27s shameful sense of being naked after accepting the serpent\u27s gift of the knowledge of good and evil. Elsewhere, I have explored some of the ways that western religions thought has sexualized this foundational myth in order to take up this gnosis as my own and explore the problems and promises of sexual desire, gender difference, sexual orientation, love, mortality, and -- above all -- the inescapably transgressive nature of radical thinking about religion in the contemporary academy

Better Horrors: From Terror to Communion in Whitley Strieber's Communion (1987)

Trauma, Trick, and Transcendence in the Life of a Horror Writer: The Case of Whitley Strieber. This essay treats the theorization of horror in Whitley Strieber's Communion (1987). It also pushes us to consider more honestly and forthrightly the question of “real monsters,” that is, the phenomenology of encounters with fantastic presences routinely experienced in the environment. Historical contextualization of Strieber's abduction experiences in the Hudson Valley region and theories of other species from Charles Fort to William James are invoked to radicalize the question further