The Ontological Status of Spiritual Entities with Jack Hunter

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Feb 18, 2026 Jack Hunter, PhD, is author of Spirits, Gods, and Magic: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the Supernatural; Engaging the Anomalous; and is editor of an anthology titled Greening the Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience. He is also coeditor, with David Luke, of Talking With The Spirits: Ethnographies From Between The Worlds. He is also founder of the journal, Paranthropology. Here he describes different approaches taken to the realm of spirits by scholars in anthropology. He recalls his own fieldwork studying spiritualist mediumship in the United Kingdom. He presents various cases suggesting that spiritual entities are part of the natural world. However, he acknowledges that it is exceedingly tricky to distinguish between living agent psi and autonomous spiritual entities. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on August 31, 2020)

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