Jeffery Paine, Enlightenment Town: Finding Spiritual Awakening in a Most Improbable Place. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2018. $15.95. 236 pp.

Crestone, Colorado is home to twenty-five spiritual centers representing nearly all the brand-name faiths of the world. Paine introduces a cast of spiritual mavericks and unlikely visionaries. He finds in Crestone a remarkable dedication to coexistence. Paradoxically, the town’s amazing spiritual diversity highlights fundamental commonalities in a way that will strike and even inspire believers, agnostics, and searchers of every stripe.

Deondra Rose, Citizens by Degree: Higher Education Policy and the Changing Gender Dynamics of American Citizenship. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. $29.95. 291 pp.

Rose, assistant professor of public policy and political science at Duke University, shows that women’s progress in higher education derives in large part from the actions of lawmakers who used a combination of redistributive and regulatory policies to enhance women’s incorporation into their roles as American citizens. She argues that federal higher education policy has been an indispensable component of the American welfare state.

Howard G. Schneiderman, Engagement and Disengagement: Class, Authority, Politics, and Intellectuals. New York: Routledge, 2018. $39.95. 306 pp.

Schneiderman, professor of sociology at Lafayette College, offers here the culmination of his life’s work in social theory. On the one hand, he considers the cohesive social, cultural, and intellectual forces, such as authority, community, status, and the sacred, that tie us together, and on the other hand, the forces such as alienation, politics, and economic warfare that pull us apart.

Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. $34.99. 278 pp.

Campbell, associate professor of sociology at California State University and Manning, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at West Virginia University offer a framework for understanding recent moral conflicts at US universities, which have bled thoroughly into society at large. In tracking the rise of victimhood culture, they help to decode an often dizzying cultural milieu.

Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. New York: Basic Books, 2018. $32.00. 419 pp.

Pearl, professor of computer science at UCLA and Mackenzie, an award-winning science writer provide a popular account that explains why the long standing claim that correlation is not causation and the taboo against insisting otherwise is dead. The authors contend that the most profound implications of the study of causality may lie in the field of artificial intelligence. They present a picture of a future where clarity about causality will “transform computers into true scientists.”