Edited by Jack Hunter
2016 Aporetic Press
172 pages

Damned Facts: Fortean Essays on Religion, Folklore and the Paranormal is a collection of essays adopting a variety of 'Fortean' approaches to the study of religion, folklore and the paranormal. Over the course of four ground-breaking books published between 1919-1932, Charles Fort gathered thousands of accounts of weird events and experiences that seemed to upset the established models of mainstream science and religion. In order to explore these events Fort developed the philosophy of Intermediatism, whereby all phenomena (from the most mundane to the most extraordinary), are understood to partake of a quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal. It is from this indeterminate vantage point that the chapters in this book begin their investigations.

Table Of Contents:

Foreword: Damned Comparisons and the Real - Jeffrey J. Kripal

Introduction: Intermediatism and the Study of Religion - Jack Hunter

Chapter 1: No Limestone in the Sky: The Politics of Damned Facts - Amba J. Sepie

Chapter 2: The Methodologies of Radical Empiricism: The Experiential Worlds of William James and Charles Fort - Timothy Grieve-Carlson

Chapter 3: Extraordinary Religious/Anomalous Cases from Brazil and the Fortean Approach - Wellington Zangari, Fatima Regina Machado, Everton de Oliveira Maraldi and Leonardo Breno Martins

Chapter 4: A New Demonology: John Keel and The Mothman Prophecies - David Clarke

Chapter 5: UFO Abductions as Mystical Encounter: Faerie Folklore in W.Y. Evans-Wentz, Jacques Vallee and Whitley Strieber - Robin Jarrell

Chapter 6: Misunderstanding Myth as History: The Case of British-Israelism - David V. Barrett

Chapter 7: The Transmediumizers - Eden S. French and Christopher Laursen

Chapter 8: The Mirror Maze: True Reflections of the Hyperprophets - James Harris

Chapter 9: Implications of a Paranormal Labyrinth - Roberta Harris Short

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Damned-Facts-Religion-Folklore-Paranormal/dp/9963221424/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1461879901&sr=1-2&keywords=damned+facts+jack+hunter

Special Issue 'Fieldwork in Religion: Bodily Experience and Ethnographic Knowledge'
Vol 2 (2016)
Edited by Emily Pierini and Alberto Groisman
 
Access and download a free copy of the Journal here: 
​http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/issue/view/4

Articles:
 
Introduction. Fieldwork in Religion: Bodily Experience and Ethnographic Knowledge
Emily Pierini and Alberto Groisman
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/27/30
 
Full Participation and Ethnographic Reflexivity. An Afro-Brazialian Case Study
Arnaud Halloy
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/16/31
 
Embodied Encounters: Ethnographic Knowledge, Emotions and the Senses in the Vale do Amanhecer's Spirit Mediumship
Emily Pierini
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/23/32
 
Daime Religions, Mediumship and Religious Agency: Health and the Fluency of Social Relations
Alberto Groisman
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/25/37
 
Studying the Body in Rastafari Rituals: Spirituality, Embodiment and Ethnographic Knowledge
Anna Waldstein
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/17/34
 
Spirits, Spies and Lies in Havana: Unwitting and Paranoid Entanglements between the Ethnographer and the Field
Diana Espirito Santo
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/12/35
 
Immersion in Experiencing the Sacred: Insights into the Ethnography of Religion
Stefania Palmisano
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/19/38
 
This Special Issue examines the construction of ethnographic knowledge in researching among participants of religious and spiritual groups through the lenses of bodily experience. Articles discuss the methodological implications of engaging the scholarly body in the field and the ways in which to convey these experiences through ethnography, by addressing the empirical, ethical, epistemological, relational, political and analytical implications of this significant aspect of fieldwork. Authors are particularly concerned with religious and spiritual groups whose practices imply the use of techniques, resources, plants, substances and other strategies used in religious contexts to modify the states of consciousness. They ask specifically how does the researcher's experience in researching among these groups inform the production of ethnographic knowledge? In which way does it redefine our analytical categories, and even the way we approach the experiences of participants in these groups? Up to which extent do our interlocutors expect us to know about their experiences and practices? Assessing critically their own experiences and their implications, they raise issues associated with contemporary debates around concepts of 'knowledge' and 'belief', 'body', 'self' and 'personhood', 'health' and 'illness' in religious contexts.