Mark Danner is author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (New York Review of Books, 2004), as well as a writer and journalism professor. He divides his time between New York and San Francisco.

Concerned United Birthparents, based in California, began as a support group for birth parents and other birth family members. The group promotes open adoption records and family searches, proposes that most adoptions can and should be prevented and helps some families keep their children when they’re considering adoption because of financial stress. Contact Sarah Burns.

Pact is a national nonprofit that provides education and adoption service to children of color, their birth parents and their adoptive parents. Beth Hall is the founder and executive director.

Joan Heifetz Hollinger is the John and Elizabeth Boalt Lecturer in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. She is a scholar of adoption law, including the Indian Child Welfare Act, and of psychosocial aspects of adoptive family relationships. She is an advocate of adoption law reform and has served on […]

Khaleel Mohammed is an assistant professor of religion at San Diego State University who specializes in Islam, Islamic law and comparative religion. He teaches courses in world religions, the Quran, sex and gender in Islam, and Islamic bioethics. He has been trained as a jurist in both the Sunni and Shiite schools and posts his […]

The Center for Christian Bioethics, which opened in 1984, sponsors teaching, research and service in biomedical ethics and related fields at Loma Linda University in California. The university includes a health sciences campus operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It conducts monthly bioethics grand rounds at Loma Linda University Medical Center; an annual bioethics seminar in […]

Michael Bernard Beckwith is minister of the 8,000-member Agape International Spiritual Center in Culver City, Calif. He is one of the spiritual leaders featured in The Secret, and the Agape Center is part of the New Thought tradition.

J. Gordon Melton is a distinguished professor of American religious history at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Formerly, he directed the Institute for the Study of American Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has written about New Religious Movements and about Christian Science and is an expert on American-born religions. He co-wrote Perspectives on […]

Risa Levitt Kohn is a professor of Hebrew Bible and Judaism at San Diego State University. She was also curator of the June 2007 Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the San Diego Natural History Museum.