Brian Malley Email & Phone Number

I've spent my career at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), where I lecture in Psychology. I am married, with two amazing children. I have half a dog—my wife has the other half and a cat.As a Lecturer IV, my main courses are Psych 112: Introduction to Psychology as a Natural Science and Psych 401: Religion & Spirituality. I love interacting with students, helping them to make connections and to enrich their understanding of human beings and our unique minds. In a society in which everyone has smart phone access to Wikipedia, there is little point to the memorization of psychological facts. To my way of thinking, the most important educational contribution I can make is to help students to develop an informed perspective within which they can understand the facts they will encounter in the rest of their lives. In preparing lectures I put a great deal of thought into what theories I will address, how I will approach them, and how they are relevant to students' understanding. I create my own lecture slides in Adobe Animate, and produce much of my own artwork and animations. I prefer to give assignments that are short but require deep thought. Students generally say that my courses are interesting and significantly enrich their understanding.My research and writing has been in the Cognitive Science of Religion, especially in my specialty, Scripturalism: people's beliefs about and uses of sacred texts like the Bible, the Qur'an, and the Adi Granth. My book, How the Bible Works, is an anthropological and psychological study of evangelical Christian Biblicism. I've recently contributed a chapter on Scripturalism to the Oxford Handbook to the Cognitive Science of Religion (2022), edited by Justin Barrett, with whom I have also coauthored a couple articles.I am an increasingly devout Christian, an aspiring disciple of Jesus, and my relationship with God is fundamental to how I live. I would almost certainly be dead if God had not intervened, repeatedly, in my life to save me, mainly from my own worst tendencies. I am very grateful.I have wide interests, reading in such areas as the peoples of the Pacific islands, the history of mathematics, human evolution, the origins of urban living and agriculture, human motivation, religions of the Greek and Roman world, information theory, and 20th century military history. The greatest benefit of my education was an integrated understanding in which all things are connected, however disparate they might be on their face. Everything I read enriches this perspective, so I love learning.