The Sacred Speaks

139: Wouter Hanegraaff – Rejected Knowledge, Idolatry, and Colonialism

May 12, 2026

In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John W. Price returns to a conversation with Dr. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, professor at the University of Amsterdam and one of the foremost scholars of Western esotericism. Their first conversation opened into the history of Hermetic spirituality. This one goes further. Hanegraaff's new book, Esotericism in Western Culture: Counter-Normativity and Rejected Knowledge, reframes the entire question: esotericism is not a tradition to be catalogued. It is what...

138: Leslie Kean on Surviving Death, UFO Reporting, and Non-Local Consciousness

April 21, 2026

Does consciousness survive death? Investigative journalist Leslie Kean has spent two decades following the evidence, from Pentagon UFO reports to physical mediums in the UK. In this episode, she and John Price explore what happens when rigorous investigation meets phenomena that refuse to fit inside a materialist frame. Kean describes her path from Zen practice and investigative journalism through the pivotal 1999 French UFO report, to the landmark 2017 New York Times Pentagon UFO story (wit...

137: Timothy Morton – Facing The Flames: Exploring Hell and Reality

April 09, 2026

In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John W. Price sits down with Timothy Morton, philosopher, writer, and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, for a wide-ranging conversation about hell, ontology, and what it means to live without an "outside." Morton is the author of Hell, along with numerous works on ecology, object-oriented ontology, and the entanglement of human and nonhuman worlds. Together, John and Morton explore hell not as an afterlife destination but as a live...