Rupert Sheldrake outraged the scientific establishment in the early 1980s with his hypothesis of morphic resonance, and his book A New Science of Life was denounced by the journal Nature as ?the best candidate for burning there has been for many years?. With his academic career torpedoed, Sheldrake has become the champion of ?the people's science?. Books such as Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At have won him popular acclaim and continued academic opprobrium in equal measure. In "Sheldrake and his Critics" (a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies), Sheldrake summarizes his case for the ?non-visual detection of staring? and his claims are scrutinised by 14 distinguished researchers, to whose commentaries Sheldrake then responds. Anthony Freeman, in his editorial introduction, explores the concept of ?heresy? in science and in religion and asks why it provokes such hostility.