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MYS437a: Can science show that the soul survives death? This fall, Jimmy Akin is teaching two online courses for the Rhine Education Center that take the question seriously, and he lays out both in this short bonus episode.

The first is a brand-new course, Cases of the Reincarnation Type and Near-Death Experiences, which has never been taught before. It begins Tuesday, October 6, and meets Tuesdays for eight weeks from 2 to 4 p.m. Eastern. The first half covers near-death experiences: people who were clinically dead, with no heartbeat, who came back and reported leaving their bodies, watching what happened around them and passing into another world. Some reported things they had no natural way of knowing that turned out to be true. Jimmy will cover famous cases like Pam Reynolds, the “dentures man” and Maria’s shoe, research from Raymond Moody to the hospital studies under way today, and the distressing NDEs that are an important part of the data. Many people have been told science shows we are nothing but our brains. Near-death research is one of the places where that claim runs into serious trouble.

None of this is new. Pope St. Gregory the Great preserved accounts of people who died, revived and described what they saw, and St. Bede the Venerable told of a man who died one night, revived the next morning and spent the rest of his life as a monk.

The second half turns to cases of the reincarnation type: mostly young children who talk about a previous life, sometimes giving names, places and details later found to match a real person. The research was pioneered by Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia, and the course looks at strong cases like James Leininger and Ryan Hammons. The cases need explaining, but does the explanation have to be reincarnation, or could it be something else?

The second course, Introduction to Parapsychology, begins Wednesday, October 7, and meets for eight weeks from 7 to 9 p.m. Eastern. It covers the laboratory evidence for telepathy, remote viewing and precognition, along with spontaneous experiences like apparitions, hauntings and poltergeists. Doctors of the Church such as St. Thomas Aquinas and Gregory the Great held that what we would call psychic functioning does exist.

Both courses are online, with weekly lectures recorded so you can watch them when it suits you. You can audit either course for your own interest or take it for a grade toward a Rhine certificate in parapsychology. To learn more and sign up, visit rhineedu.org.

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• Parapsychology Education

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