Social Science Research Council

In the New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book on America’s habit of self-defeating optimism.

Greg Epstein, the Humanist chaplain at Harvard University and a blogger at Tikkun Daily, discusses his new book, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe.

The Wall Street Journal’s Naomi Schaeffer Riley reviews Souls in Transition, a new book by Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, which examines the religious and spiritual lives of 18- to 24-year old “emerging adults” in America.

Mark C. Taylor, chair of the Religion department at Columbia University, discusses his new book, Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living.

In the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Meaney reviews In Praise of Doubt, a new book by sociologist Peter Berger and philosopher Anton Zijderveld.

Andrew Linzey, director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, has a new book called Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics, reviewed by Marilyn Matevia at the Englewood Review of Books.

Haroon Moghul, over at Religion Dispatches, gives flying colors to Dave Eggers’s new novel about a Muslim man who sets off into the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina in a canoe.

Mitch Horowitz, editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin, has a new forthcoming book called Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation. At the website of bestselling occult theorist Graham Hancock, Horowitz has an overview of the book.

William Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict is now out from Oxford University Press.

At Books & Culture, Timothy Larsen reviews two recent books on the metaphysics of mathematics, Daniel J. Cohen’s Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith and Mario Livio’s Is God a Mathematician?