Brian Malley

The sacredness of God

One of the difficulties I run into in expounding Pascal Boyer's theory of the minimal counterintuitiveness of religious concepts ("MCI theory") is that many people feel that the critical feature of

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Heaven before the space age

or How I grew up with two parallel cosmologies Much has been said in cognitive approaches to religion about the co-existence in believers of beliefs that may seem blatantly inconsistent. The way

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Is the “problem of evil” universal?

Reading a book recommended by my brother, Gregory Boyd's God at war (1997), I have recently been thinking about the problem of evil. Boyd suggests that the problem of evil arises because Christians

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Cross potatoes

"It was 7:30 PM, December 4th, 2005. The second Sunday of advent, in Joshua Tree, California. Personal Chef Karin Winkler started to prepare dinner. While thinking about upcoming Christmas, she

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Golden bell and Iron shirt

In some traditions there is an interesting gap betweeen what people think they are going to learn from the tradition and what actually ends up being transmitted. Recently I found a nice example of

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A question about polemics

Recently I came across a quotation that expressed, with wonderful clarity, something that I kind of half-knew but had not articulated so well to myself. The historian John P. Meier, in the course of

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g Tum-mo heat meditation

Preparing for a lecture on homeostatic mechanisms, I came across a surprising phenomenon, g tum-mo heat meditation, that raises an interesting question about human enculturability. Homeostatic

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The quest for Jesus

One of my interests is the history of Christianity, particularly the first few centuries, when there were some interesting varieties of the religion—my religion—quite unlike anything we see

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Scylla and Charybdis

Some of the most enduring kinds of cultural traditions have been interpretive in nature. My research has focused on the interaction of cognition and culture surrounding the Christian Bible, but in

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Attribution

Some of the most enduring kinds of cultural traditions have been interpretive in nature. My research has focused on the interaction of cognition and culture surrounding the Christian Bible, but in

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The interpretive process

This is the third installment of a series of posts on a cognitive approach to interpretive traditions (Part One - Part Two). One of the things people do with texts is read them. This is certainly

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The interpretand

This is the second installment of a series of posts on a cognitive approach to interpretive traditions. The aim of this series is a general framework for the analysis of interpretive traditions. W

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Interpretive traditions

My principle contribution to the Cognitive Science of Religion has been an ethnography of an interpretive tradition, How the Bible Works, in which I developed a cognitively informed model of evange

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The relevance of cognitive relevance for students of culture

Last month I posted "A case for the Cognitive principle of relevance" on this blog, and Dan Sperber expressed the wish that I had given readers some idea how that discussion was itself relevant to

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A case for the Cognitive principle of relevance

I have a cautious, even grudging, appreciation for the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Though I am dispositionally inclined to dismiss Freud's ideas wholesale, I have come to credit him with some genuine

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Did Settlement Have Cognitive Consequences?

While reading Colin Renfrew’s new book Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (Weidenfeld, 2007 - Random House, 2008), I was struck by his observation (taken in turn from Wilson, The Domesticat

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Magic and inference

I must confess a predilection for the anthropological and psychological writing of the mid-twentieth century, when anthropologists were still trying to explain culture and the principles of the

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