1. Barry Markovsky and Shane R. Thye, “Social Influence on Paranormal Beliefs,” Sociological Perspectives 44 (Spring 2001): 22. Also, in this chapter, paranormal refers to belief in spirits, whereas parapsychological refers to belief in mental perception abilities like ESP, telekinesis, precognition.
2. In his book, Deviant Science: The Case of Parapsychology, author James McClenon discusses how parapsychology is not considered “a fully legitimate science” because “the acts parapsychologists engage in include conducting research in anomalies with low ontological status.” James McClenon, Deviant Science: The Case of Parapsychology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 11. He goes on to say that the social sciences are prevented from attaining any sort of full legitimacy from the hard sciences for the same reasons (p. 15). He states that science suffers from what he calls “scientism,” citing Voegelin’s three components: “(1) the assumption that the mathematized science of natural phenomena is a model to which all other sciences ought to conform; (2) that all realms of being are accessible to the methods of the sciences of phenomena; and (3) that all reality which is not accessible to sciences of phenomena is either irrelevant or, in the more radical form of the dogma, illusionary.” (26–27).
3. Specifically, I am relating spiritual experience to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s understanding of “dialogical encounters” in the arts, in this case, film. Here, Gadamer resists modern science’s universal claim to method. Gadamer also explains the significance of art in that “it speaks to us, that it confronts man with himself in his morally determined existence” (51). For purposes here, however, art is grounded in communicative reality, not mere transcendentalism, as Gadamer is largely concerned with the change a person experiences when confronting truth communicated through art. Truth here is art’s implications for spiritual reality. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd revised ed. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994), xxii. See also Jason Paul Bourgeois, The Aesthetics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans von Balthasar (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 7.
4. Harvey J. Irwin and Caroline A. Watt, An Introduction to Parapsychology, 5th ed. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2007), 94. The definition here of psychokinesis is a “movement by the mind or psyche… an effort of the will.” By using pneumakinesis, attention is diverted from cognitive explanations for what is believed to be spiritual phenomena at base.
5. For discussion here, psi theory will be limited to Charles Tart’s distinctions of what he terms “the big five,” which are precognition, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, telepathy, and psychic healing. See Charles Tart, The End of Physicalism: How Evidence of the Paranormal Is Bringing Science and Spirit Together (Oakland: New Harbinger Publications, 2009), 89.