The Urantia Book Community March 2008 |
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India |
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The Fellowship's International Fellowship Committee sponsored
(Pictured left to right with individuals from India interested in The Urantia Book are |
Above and below: Visitors to the Fellowship's booth at the International Delhi Book Fair, February 2008.
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Participant Paula Thompson from Westminster, Colorado, writes about her experience: After years of dreaming and months of planning a team of experienced and dedicated Urantia Book evangelists exhibited The Urantia Book at the World Book Fair in Delhi India . I was blessed and honored to be a part of that team ably led by Buck Weimer and including Arlene Weimer, Charlene Morrow, Agustin Arellano and Mario Trevino. When I left for home on Friday the 8th, an Indian reader, Mr. Garfield Jansen, arrived several hundred miles by train to fill my place. It was a fantastic team and the joy, camaraderie and love at our booth attracted other exhibitors and attendees to us. Many came back and visited with us daily for the 10 days we were there. We made many friends among the Muslims, Hindus and Christians who were there.
Participant Charlene Morrow from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, writes about her experience: On Wednesday, January 30, 2008, I left Oklahoma City for Denver to begin an adventure to India. I met up with my traveling companions, Paula Thompson and Buck and Arlene Weimer. From this trip we have become wonderful friends. We were loaded to the max with 64 Urantia Books, Jesus, A New Revelation, Urdu samplers, 9,000 spiritual vitamins, 5, 000 brochures especially designed by Buck for Hindu India, DVD’s and Life after Death booklets. Our destination was Delhi for a biannual book fair, the largest in Asia. It was held at a convention center named Pragati Maidan. This book fair drew tens of thousands of people interested in new books, books for schools, publishing houses, and all manner of educational materials. Representatives were there from Japan, France, Spain, America, Russia, and many other countries as well as all part of India. International Fellowship Committee Chair Buck Weimer from Pueblo, Colorado, writes about his experience: It is a new India. With more than 1,129,000,000 spiritually endowed souls, India is second in population only to China. India is the world’s largest democracy with a middle class larger than the entire population of the United States. It is also the home of the biggest youth population on earth with over 600 million under the age of 25, most of whom used the 72 million cell phones sold there in 2007. Its diverse population has Hindus (80.5%), Muslims (13.4%), Christians (2.3%, over 20 million), Sikhs (1.9%), and other; Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians, Jews and Bahais. On the down side, one out of three of the world’s malnourished children lives in India, and over 800 million people live on less than $2.00 per day. They are the largest arms importer in the developing world, have extreme social inequality (we saw women doing most of the unskilled labor), face a growing energy crisis, poor air quality in most cities, and sustain regular terrorist attacks. The goals of this mission was first to expose the Urantia Book as the Fifth Epochal Revelation to the people of India, to get the Book and secondary materials into the hands of as many willing readers as possible, and to build a database of truth-seeking contacts when possible. A secondary goal was to develop contacts in the book distribution/printing industry in India and gather their information. . . . more |
Special thanks to all of you whose contributions made this trip to India possible! The Fellowship's next International Book Fair will be in Argentina later this spring. This will be a joint project of The Urantia Book Fellowship, Urantia Foundation, and UAI. |
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Buck Weimer, Chair of the Fellowship's International Fellowship Committee, presents Dr. Chauhan with a certificate from the Fellowship acknowledging his more than two decades of service to the work of the revelation in Jabalpur, India. |
Fellowship Team Visits with Long Time Readers in Jabalpur, India
The question for the readers of this report is: Are we ready? Is the Fellowship ready to commit its expanding resources, intellectual depth, spiritual will, and vast pool of talent to our thirsty brothers and sisters on the continent of India? Read about the visit to Central India
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In one of the most turbulent regions of the planet, dedicated Urantia Book evangelists are hard at work sowing the seeds of a spiritual renaissance |
Two Pakistani enthusiasts for the revelation. |
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A Pakistani leader writes:
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Would you be willing to work just one hour each month for the revelation? by Maria Downing Tamm |
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A Slice of Light and Life by Paula Thompson |
Celestial Friends
"MBS is a group of Urantians who truly strive to live as if in the presence of God. It seemed to me that the group that gathered for this conference wholeheartedly believes that our unseen friends are sincerely interested and involved in everything we humans do." |
At the end of February I was honored to speak at a wonderful regional conference that occurs periodically at a beach on the Gulf Coast of Florida. The conference is called Celestial Nights and this time it occupied several well-appointed beach front houses on Saint George Island . The event is sponsored by a Urantia based nonprofit organization, Mind, Body and Spirit. Mind, Body and Spirit is managed by a dedicated group of UB readers from Tallahassee, Florida. Mind, Body and Spirit or MBS as they refer to themselves, is ably managed by its own celestial knight, Fred Harris and six gracious celestial ladies; Paula Sutton, Judy Langston, Steffani Murray, Helen Luke, Ann Bowman and Linda MacDonald. MBS is passionate about loving service and since the Fellowship has a conference coming up in July called The Thrill of Loving Service, I was thrilled to be there and get a foretaste of loving service in action. The conference had a great program that included presentations from Saskia Raevouri and John Lange on their work in India for the organization Free Schools; Byron Belitsos on the impact of global and environmental changes; Rob Davis on his monumental effort to archive wisdom at www.daynal.org and Halbert Katzen on harmonizing the UB with science and history at www.UBtheNews.com. These presentations were interspersed with sessions of deep prayer and meditation that felt as though we collectively let our hearts out to play as spiritual children in a friendly and well-ordered universe. When I came home from Celestial Nights I felt nurtured and ministered to. In fact, after eating Judy Langston’s lovingly prepared gourmet vegetarian food, and being the recipient of so much love, ministry and prayers, I felt fed in mind, body and spirit. How apropos! This conference reminded me of one of my favorite sayings of Mother Theresa, “We can not do great things. We can only do little things with great love.” MBS did a little conference with great love and I for one am deeply grateful to have been there. I offer my heartfelt thanks to all who attended and contributed to this lovely experience. It was truly a slice of Light and Life! |
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Morontia Mota: A New Perspective -- Matthew Block's research sheds new light on one of The Urantia Book's most popular sections. |
The Urantia Book's first critical researcher, Matthew Block, at work sleuthing for books which may have been used in the construction of The Urantia Book. |
When I first started browsing through the Urantia Book at a bookstore in 1976, the twenty-eight statements in the "Morontia Mota" section were among the first passages to hold my attention. This series of aphorisms, spread across pages 556 and 557, was a welcome island of simplicity in a book full of dense paragraphs and intricate discussions. For several weeks I kept returning to the bookstore, debating with myself whether to buy the book, and this was one of the sections that sold me. The faith and idealism conveyed in these statements (as well as in the Rodan papers, Paper 100 and the selected excerpts on the dust jacket) reassured me that a moral soundness and an intelligent compassion lay at the heart of the book. Thus assured, I decided to take the plunge into the rest of the text, with its daunting but fascinating complexities. The appeal of these twenty-eight statements, I’ve since come to see, is widely shared by Urantia Book readers and believers. These aphorisms have appeared more often in Urantia movement newsletters and periodicals than any other part of the Urantia Book, their convenient size making them ideal corner fillers. They have been a topic of study at numerous conference workshops and in Internet message forums. They’ve appeared in calendars and on cards, and have thus become, in some ways, the Urantia Book’s equivalent of the Bible’s Book of Proverbs.
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What is Character? Why is Character Important? How do you get Character? A study presented at the Texas Spiritual Living Conference, February 2008, by Bill Cooper |
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Payment for IC08 made easy Greetings everyone: we are using a registration service that allows you to register on-line and make payments at a convenient time for you. You are required to make a $125 deposit but after the initial payment, you may pay monthly or at anytime, by logging into the link sent after you have registered. If you register by May 1st you’ll get a beautiful conference tote bag and save money as well! Register Online Now |
You can listen in on a live Urantia Book Study group every Friday evening at 7:30 pm Mountain time. |
Participate in a Urantia Book Skypecast from the new Boulder School:
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The Urantia Book Fellowship Community Update Website: http://urantiabook.org |
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