Can a Heart Transplant Change Your Identity?

When I was in graduate school for philosophy, I took a class with Derek Parfit who was known for his work on the relationship between personal identity and ethics. One of the thought experiments he asked us to consider (taken from his book Reasons and Persons) involved our brain's being transplanted into two separate bodies--half of...

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Children Who Remember Communicating from the Afterlife

I've posted before about children who remember living in heaven before their births or who remember having lived previous lives on earth. Recently, I've found some pre-birth memory cases that are particularly relevant to the new book I'm writing on coincidences. These are cases in which children remember dying in a previous life and then...

Is the Universe a Hologram?

If I haven't posted much lately, it's because I've spent the last eight months hard at work writing a new book! The subject is one that has long been dear to my heart: coincidences. Over the next few months, I'm going to try to post more regularly, but as you might expect, given where my...

Jumping Over Shadows

I'll admit there was probably no way I wasn't going to love Annette Gendler's 2017 memoir Jumping Over Shadows. I'm a sucker for cross-cultural romances, and for international dramas liberally sprinkled with phrases in foreign languages--especially when those languages are French, German, and Hebrew. And I can't remember ever reading a novel or memoir of Jewish...

Meant to Be

I love asking couples the story of how they met. Falling in love has always seemed to me something of a miracle. In the space of mere days--or even hours--you can go from not knowing another person exists to wanting to spend the rest of your life with them. If that's not magic, what is? And then there are the...

The Way of the Heart: Arnaud Desjardins

Last month, I returned to France for the first time in several years, and one of the highlights of my trip was getting to browse my favorite French bookstore. As you can see from the photo, I didn't leave empty-handed! The top three titles in the pile are all by a fellow named Arnaud Desjardins, well-known in France...

Journalist Leslie Kean with more impressive evidence for an afterlife

I almost didn't buy Leslie Kean's new book Surviving Death, because I was worried it was nothing more than an overview of the afterlife evidence I'm already quite familiar with. But while there was certainly some description of the seminal case studies, there was also so much new material that it was absolutely worth the money I paid for a...

Difficult feelings

I was wrestling with some difficult feelings yesterday--the kind that good, spiritual people aren't supposed to have. You know what I'm talking about? In this day and age, we're all supposed to be enlightened and know that our circumstances aren't responsible for how we feel--we are. And yet...that's not how life is all the time....

How This Crazy Journey Began…

For all those who have asked me how I got from being an atheist with a PhD in analytic philosophy to being someone who takes seriously children's memories of past lives...here's a little of how that crazy journey began. I first started opening up to the possibility of meaning and purpose in the universe six years...