Producing a book as a tenured professor retired from the Department of Physiological Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, is probably not an activity to invite unusual notice. But if the book is titled Infinite Mind: Science of the Human Vibrations of Consciousness and if one of its chapters announces as its topic “The Human Aura: Living Vibrations Brought to Light,” perhaps there is reason to take a second look. “Too often we scientists get lost in our data,” observes Valerie V. Hunt, “forgetting that the essence of science is careful observation, deep thought, and wise deductions from both reasoning AND the exercise of mystical and dreamlike states.” With a declared background in neurophysiology and psychology as well as teaching experience at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, and UCLA, Hunt invites readers both lay and scientific: “Come with me on a journey of discovery into the research of the vibrant human aura that you can follow and understand. For scientists, my reasoning, although broad and penetrating—and sometimes mystical—is based upon scientific facts and clinical observations.”

During much of the twentieth Century, adoption has relied on the paradoxical theory that differences are managed best by denying their existence. According to the “matching” paradigm that has governed modern adoption, adults who acquire children born to others must look, feel, and behave as if they had given birth themselves. In spite of intensive efforts to erase distinction, distinction endures as an obvious characteristic of kinship outside of blood. The fact that adoption is a different way to make a family has profoundly shaped popular attitudes and professional policies. The fact that adoptive families are “made up” is surely one of the most interesting and important things about how such families come to be.

In March 1830, the Grandin Press in Palmyra, New York, published the first edition of the Book of Mormon. On April 6, Joseph Smith, Jr., organized the Church of Christ—Mormonism—in Fayette near the Finger Lakes. Shortly thereafter, Joseph's unschooled younger brother Samuel filled a knapsack with copies of the book and traveled to villages westward to make converts to what he believed to be the restoration of primitive Christianity. From these beginnings, a small army of itinerant missionaries gathered several thousand American converts throughout the 1830's.