Diana Walsh Pasulka, Ph.D. | American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology | Special Edition #14

👁️‍🗨️ This is a special QUARANTINE EDITION of Speaking of Jung.
Religious studies professor Diana Walsh Pasulka, Ph.D. joins us from the University of North Carolina Wilmington to discuss her books, Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional & Popular Culture, and American Cosmic: UFOs Religion Technology, purgatory caves, synchronicity fatigue, levitating and bilocating saints, and the real meaning of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
After completing her undergraduate work at the University of California Davis, she earned a master’s degree in Systematic Theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and later went on to receive a doctorate in religious studies from Syracuse University.
Prof. Pasulka specializes in Catholic history, and her current research focuses on religious and supernatural belief and practice and its connections to digital technologies and environments.
Her lectures include, “Taking UFOs Seriously, That is, Religiously,” “The Belief-Effect of Media on Religion,” and “The Fairy Tale is True: Social Technologies & Belief in the Supernatural.”
Along with her colleague, fellow religious studies professor Jeffrey Kripal, Dr. Pasulka co-organized the conferences “Emergent Technologies & New Mythologies” for the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and “Bodies of Light & Super Saints” for the Esalen Center for Theory & Research.
She served as head religion advisor for the films The Conjuring (2013) and The Conjuring II (2016), and has received numerous grants and awards for research and applied learning, including sums from the Esalen Center in 2016 for research at Castel Gandolfo’s Vatican Observatory, and in 2018 for ongoing research involving the Vatican and the Vatican Archives.
Her two books, published by Oxford University Press, are Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional & Popular Culture (2015), and American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (2019). She is also co-editor of Posthumanism: The Future of Homo Sapiens (2018) which includes her chapters, “The Prehistory of the Posthuman” and “The Spectrum of Human Techno-hybridity: The Total Recall Effect,” and of the newly-released Believing in Bits: New Media & the Supernatural (2020) which includes her chapter, “Where Soul Meets Technology: Catholic Visionaries & the Stanford Research Institute as Precedents for Human-Machine Interfaces & Social Telepathy Apps” co-written with David Metcalfe.
American Cosmic crossed from an academic to a mainstream audience and became a best seller in several genres. It has been optioned by Chad & Carey Hayes of The Conjuring franchise and is being developed for television. Dr. Pasulka is asked weekly to appear on the History Channel, A&E and other media platforms and has lectured at the Guggenheim Museum, Harvard University, and the Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley.
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