What is Urantia? What is the work of God? How do we reach him? Is there life on other planets? Did Jesus have brothers? These were some of the many questions we came across at the pavilion of the Cali Book Fair, which lasted 11 days and was organized by the collaborative efforts of the Urantia Associations of Colombia and Cali (URANCOL and URACALI.) Between looks of amazement, a desire for knowledge, skepticism, and interest, more than 8,000 people received our love for the revelation and information about The Urantia Book. Eighty people asked to us to keep in touch, and 23 bought a hard copy of the book.
Bogota International Book Fair – Colombia 2019
Once again, the Urantia Bogotá Association, with the support of Urantia Association International, was present at the renowned International Bogotá Book Fair: FILBO 2019.
This year we had a large stand located in one of the best pavilions of the fair—the pavilion of the universities—that brought us a more intellectual audience with deeper questions than usual. We were challenged to broaden our answers and discussions, therefore devote more time to each visitor. It was very pleasant to talk with the young university students of this city, with their outstanding thirst for knowledge and desire to understand things of a spiritual nature.
Peru 2021 – International Conference Update
11th Urantia Association International Conference in the Land of the Incas
- Our Theme: Towards Cosmic Citizenship… Your Time Has Come!
- Our Location: Urubamba, Cusco-Peru
- The Date: April 22th-25th, 2021
- How to Register and More: Click Here
- Event Registration Link: https://cvent.me/kMVko7
Man … can elect to become more than a man; can choose to embark upon the voyage of universe ascension, but this is because the human choice and the divine will happen to be coincident upon this point. And what a son desires and the Father wills will certainly come to pass. [Paper 118:6.5, page 1300.1]
…Your short sojourn on Urantia, on this sphere of mortal infancy, is only a single link, the very first in the long chain that is to stretch across universes and through the eternal ages. It is not so much what you learn in this first life; it is the experience of living this life that is important. Even the work of this world, paramount though it is, is not nearly so important as the way in which you do this work. There is no material reward for righteous living, but there is profound satisfaction—consciousness of achievement—and this transcends any conceivable material reward. [Paper 39:4.13, page 435.6]
… And this entire living adaptation of love must be effected in the light of both the environment of present evil and the eternal goal of the perfection of divine destiny. [Paper 180:5.10, page 1950.5]
What is the timeline in the evolutionary history of humanity? What are the traces left by the violet race that, today, we may freely utilize? How can we become conscious citizens of the universe? How can we turn ourselves into competent and reliable beings in the eyes of the universe? What is our commitment towards the Supreme Being—the evolutionary Deity? Can the age of light and life become a reality here and now?
Florida Urantia Conference 2020
The Agondonter Boot Camp Society of Florida and the Urantia Association of Florida are jointly sponsoring a conference on Service and Ministry, 14—16 February, 2020 at DaySpring Episcopal Conference Center Parrish, Florida (45 minutes from Tampa—St. Petersburg airports.)
Make this a part of your winter vacation to the Sunshine State!
What does it mean to serve? What does it mean to minister? How do we find ways to be of service and get prepared? How do we uplift service to a higher level of ministry?
Vancouver 2020 – Urantia Global Experience
University of the Fraser Valley, BC Canada
July 28 to August 1, 2020
Lifting Together – United in Purpose – Serving God the Supreme
The Urantia Association of Canada and The Urantia Book Fellowship have teamed up to host this gathering in the Vancouver Fraser Valley. They invite everyone to come together to serve the global community by making a personal contribution to civilization on Urantia.
The Urantia Global Experience is a gathering of minds dedicated to serving God the Supreme through the exploration of solutions for the progressive evolution of civilization. We believe the overall success of this experimental endeavor rests on our spiritual unity—our common motive to express the will of God in our personal daily lives as well as in our social institutions.
Donating with AmazonSmile
Did you know that when you shop for the holidays at AmazonSmile, Amazon donates to Urantia Association International?
What is AmazonSmile?
AmazonSmile is a simple and automatic way for you to support Urantia Association International every time you shop, at no cost to you. When you shop at AmazonSmile you’ll find the exact same prices, vast selection and convenient shopping experience as Amazon.com, with the added bonus that Amazon will donate a portion of the purchase price to the Association.
How do I shop at AmazonSmile?
To shop at AmazonSmile simply go to smile.amazon.com on your computer or mobile device. (You may also want to add a bookmark to AmazonSmile to make it even easier to return and start your shopping at there.)
Planned Giving Strategies Seminar
In November of 2019 Bradly Tharp, Urantia Association’s Chief Financial Officer (who is also a Certified Financial Planning Practitioner and Chartered Financial Accountant) presented the following talk at the online seminar regarding Planned Giving Strategies.
Journal Editorial November 2019
Greetings Fellow Urantia Book Readers,
The second production of the Urantia Association’s Journal for 2019 highlights articles and presentations about study groups and how they are viewed by readers around the world. We have an overview of “The Study Group,” by Agnes Lazar, Belgium, “Study Groups Revisited” by Gaétan Charland, Canada, and both “Dynamic and Living Peace” and “Study Groups” by Moustapha N’diaye, Senegal. Each one is a vibrant understanding of what is needed to motivate and guide students of The Urantia Book to a greater comprehension of the teachings within this galactic reservoir of cosmic knowledge.
The Study Group
In this article, I wish to share some reflections that have been long maturing, the result of which are experiences in the bosom of different study groups, including one I initiated 16 years ago.
In January 2001, arising from various personal ordeals, I found myself in great confusion. Turning to God, I prayed to be led to discover a deeper sense of the notion of love as well as a clearer path in life in the years to come. The response was not slow. In September of the same year, I found myself in a group of long-term readers of The Urantia Book. We were all in the presence of an educator who, very simply, spoke of mankind as a creature of God, carrying on an eternal project of progression and growth, to which one could join without delay and in an active way.
This instructor aroused in me a profound desire to do as he did: to consecrate my life to developing and affirming my relationship with God, to make him known around me, and to start a serious study of the fifth revelation.
Study Groups Revisited
During the conference in Amsterdam, I met with a long-time reader and had an interesting discussion with him about the name, nature, function, mission, and goals of study groups. Since then I had a few more discussions about this subject with readers from Europe, North America, Africa, and my local association. In all those exchanges, my goal was to explore what can be done to make study groups more appealing, practical, and useful to the readers and students of both the new and the old generations.
Looking at the directives expressed by the revelators in the Publication Mandate to create thousands of study groups, to train leaders and teachers, and to respond to the challenge to accomplish the mission of The Urantia Book as stated in the Foreword: to expand cosmic consciousness and enhance spiritual perception [0:0.2]—and to answer the other great challenge, to achieve better communication with the divine Monitor that dwells within the human mind [196:3.34], my questions are: Are the study groups fulfilling these goals? Or are study groups organized and facilitated without having any of these specific goals?
From these exchanges, I realized that study groups need to be revisited if they are to accomplish what the revelators possibly had in mind for them. Perhaps doing study groups for so many years and becoming somewhat complacent about them, we may gradually forget about their true purpose and importance while making them more intellectual and social instead of more spiritually progressive and attractive to a new generation of readers.
What Does the Future Hold for Study Groups?
In the mid-1970s, guided by our spiritual mentor, a number of like-minded friends and I entered into a new journey of spiritual awakening based on the revelations of The Urantia Book. Our mentor, who had received his copy of the “Urantia Cosmology” directly from a French reader in the 1960s, tailored the guidance he offered us to the sociological reality of Senegal at the time. In the year 2000, some twenty-five years later, we discovered and began working with several other study groups worldwide.
Two years earlier, in December of 1998, we spoke by telephone with a Trustee of Urantia Foundation. A Fellowship member had contacted the Trustee around that same time in an effort to find a local Dakar contact to assist with his Fellowship mission to Africa. He had planned a short stopover in Dakar, along with his companion to pick up a shipment of English copies of The Urantia Book that had just arrived from the Port of Marseille. These books were destined for distribution throughout English-speaking African countries (Senegal is French-speaking) and, together, they had planned to crisscross Africa to carry out their mission.
Dynamic and Living Peace
And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. [Philippians 4:7]
O bestow on your people Israel great peace forever, for you are King and the Lord of all peace. … Blessed are you, Yahweh, who blesses his people Israel with peace. [Paper 150:8, page 1685]
Peace be unto you. And unto you, peace.
Introduction
Who among us has paused to reflect upon the familiar greeting and response, “Peace be unto you. And unto you, peace?” This essay draws on personal experience and understandings, the testimonials from those who collaborated in its writing, and an assessment of the religious literature of the Far East (particularly the writings of Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism), to do just that—pause and reflect on a dynamic and living peace. In so doing, this reflection explicitly relies on the teachings of The Urantia Book and the example provided by the life of Jesus as recounted in Part IV.
We have two goals. The first is to determine the extent to which human and superhuman agents contributed to this much desired peace, despite the unexpected consequences arising from the vicissitudes of our planetary history. And the second, to understand how our experience with the teachings of The Urantia Book reveal the myriad problems of the modern world, the relationship of those problems to a lack of dynamic and living peace, and the practical contributions this revelation can offer for their resolution.
Our immediate observation from this reflection identifies a deep-rooted malaise that characterizes modern times. This malaise, which we refer to as “stress,” has multiple and often unsuspected sources. It results from the external conflicts and internal disturbances that increasingly pervade both our individual lives and society at large. Globalization and the interweaving of economic, cultural, political, religious, and social institutions makes this malaise one the most widely shared perils confronting us today.
Webinars & Workshops
Urantia Association International’s Education Committee produces educational programs to encourage study of The Urantia Book. One of these ongoing programs is to present a number of online workshops and webinars which are recorded. Most of them are now available on the Association’s YouTube channel.
For your convenience, we have embedded the English webinars and workshops below. Some of them have been produced with the help of the Association’s Study Groups Committee in an effort to improve the quality and effectiveness of study groups. We hope you find them interesting and helpful.
Italian-French-Spanish Conference 2019
24th to 27th October, 2019
We are pleased to announce the fifth conference in Italy for Italian, Swiss and French-speaking readers of The Urantia Book to be held 24 to 27 October later this year in Italy. At Hotel Europa in Desenzano del Garda in Lombardy, on the southwestern shore of Lake Garda in northern Italy and not far away from the city Verona.
It will be an honor and a pleasure to welcome Italian, French and Spanish-speaking participants also. We intend this event to be a spiritually uplifting meeting as we come together in a friendly atmosphere to share our common ideals.
Program
The conference theme will be, “Spiritual Maturity” through character-strength and a unified personality realizing a life rich with enormous potential given to us by the Universal Father.
Read More
President’s Message – September 2019
Religionists, as a group, must never concern themselves with anything but religion, albeit any one such religionist, as an individual citizen, may become the outstanding leader of some social, economic, or political reconstruction movement. [Paper 99:3.15, page 1089.7]
Indirectly, cultural civilization is influenced by the attitude of these individual religionists as they become active and influential members of various social, moral, economic, and political groups. [Paper 99:3.3, page 1088.47]
Whenever we gather as a group at a conference, there is a question that often gets raised: “What exactly are we as a group?” and “Is Urantia a religion?” In many ways we resemble a religion. We are a group of religionists; as a group, and as official organizations, we do not concern ourselves with the social, economic or political issues; we actively encourage each other and others to get to know God and to become more like him.
The difference is that throughout our history organized religions have become ingrained in the social, economic and even political realms. Group thinking replaces individual choice, and group ideas of deity replaces individual relationships with the Father. As a group of religionists, we need to actively work to keep our mission focused on God and our relationship with God.
But as individuals, we are charged with getting directly involved in society. We have the ability slowly to adjust the trajectory of the social, economic, and political realms with our spiritual and universal insights.
2nd European Urantia Association Conference
From 11-14 July 2019, the Urantia Association of Estonia hosted the 2nd European Urantia Conference at Tallink City Hotel with the theme “Sowing Seeds.” This event was the 2nd Continental Conference in Europe and took place almost three years after the Budapest conference. Eighty-seven participants celebrated friendship and brotherhood, in one of the best-preserved medieval cities of Europe, which is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Young Adults Pre-European Conference Retreat
(This is an extract summary on the Young Adults’ pre-conference retreat of Alex Heh’s personal testimonial of his experiences at the conference. Used by permission.)
In July I traveled to Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, to attend the 2nd European Urantia Association Conference. A number of young Urantia Book readers and I arrived some days earlier to attend the pre-conference retreat that was held from Sunday July 7 to Thursday July 11. This retreat was a joint event organized by Urantia Association’s UYAI (Urantia Young Adult International) and the Fellowship’s YaYas (Youth and Young Adults). I don’t exaggerate when I say that this event—held in a beautiful city and with lots of wonderful lovely people—was one of the most profound experiences in my life so far. By the end of the first night I felt I was able to leave my past behind and start a new life. It didn’t take long for me to stop thinking in my mother tongue (German) and start thinking (and feeling) in English.
September Trimester of Urantia Book Internet School
Starting Soon!
This educational program of Urantia Foundation is dedicated to fostering and facilitating the self-discovery of newly revealed truth. UBIS offers courses for all students of The Urantia Book, regardless of culture, spiritual tradition, or geographic location. Whether you are a new reader or have been studying the book for years, there will be a course appropriate for you.
The sessions are ten weeks long and require a weekly commitment of approximately three to five hours of reading selected Papers and writing responses to several questions. Alternate weeks are spent in an online discussion forum, designed to encourage deeper understanding of the assigned readings through the unique contribution of each classmate and volunteer facilitator.
Registration opens Monday, September 9. Orientation begins on Monday, September 16.
Visit the UBIS for details of courses and registration at: https://new.ubis.urantia.org/moodle/
Feria del Libro de Bolivia 2019 – Santa Cruz
The twentieth annual book fair took place in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia from May 31 to June 11. The fair had 200 exhibitors and more than 80 book presentations. More than 50 international writers and about 100 national writers attended it, with the presence of the European Union as Guest of Honor. In the middle of all this exhibition was also present the most important book to all of us volunteers attending this fair: The Urantia Book.
The volunteers of our booth spent twelve days explaining the importance of this book for humanity. Many children, young students, and adults were also present. Despite the normal skepticism of some people, there were 273 souls that were sensitive to the truths of this book and left us their contact details to receive more information.
Ecuador Book Fair 2019
This year’s book fair in Ecuador was held at the Puce Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador from 3—7 June. Although we are not yet officially recognized as the National Association of Urantia Book Readers of Ecuador (AUEC), this year we participated in the Puce Fair as AUEC.
We were located at booth number 17, which we arranged with posters alluding to The Urantia Book and graphics of the Master Universe. We were joined by a collaboration of Urantia Book students from the Readers Group of the Garden of Edentia, the Valley of the Chillos, and the city of Quito.