Introducing the Revelation to Academia:
Announcing a New Anthology

By Byron Belitsos, M.A.

We are an evolving global community, and we are getting much better at filling the needs of all sorts of people around the world, including different age groups, races, nationalities, and even speakers of nearly thirty languages. 

But there is one group whose more demanding requirements and inquisitive minds we are not yet effectively addressing: academics, scholars, and expert researchers. 

Another neglected group in this category are young students, especially those thousands of college, graduate students, or seminary students focused at any one time on the academic study of such fields as religion, ethics, psychology, philosophy, biblical studies, and theology. This next generation of young thinkers, writers, researchers, teachers, and ministers remains blithely ignorant about The Urantia Book mainly because very few of their professors have heard of the revelation or seen it referenced in the literature of their fields. 

For a long time I have felt the need to expand our secondary literature to serve the needs of this audience. By this I mean providing them with easy access to scholarly essays or books that are suitable for those deep thinkers and researchers who are not reader-believers, but are who curious about how the book’s many-sided teachings relate to their specific fields of study or who would like, for example, to research the Urantia movement as a sociological or religious phenomenon. 

I have long felt that we are paying a price for this omission, since at this time there is no coverage of the revelation in any known college or graduate level course of which I am aware, with the exception of our own courses at the UUI and UBIS and our national and international conferences. 

I believe these latter endeavors in self-education for reader-believers are sufficiently mature that we are now ready for the more difficult task of targeting the needs of the larger scholarly community—especially those in the fields of religious studies, biblical studies, and theology—that may be interested in comparative study or perhaps might aim to engage in critical study of our text alongside the literature of their disciplines. 

High Quality Research Essays

So, some years ago I tackled this issue as a personal project with the intention of filling this gap. As I reported earlier to the Fellowship community, I obtained an academic degree in theology in 2021 and my masters thesis, Truths About Evil, Sin, and the Demonic—which includes two full chapters on the UB—was brought out in 2023 by a mainstream academic publisher. 

And now, my most recent contribution along this line is to become the general editor and publisher of an anthology that aims to provide, in one introductory volume, the highest quality research essays about The Urantia Book. This relatively short book is entitled Reason and Revelation: Scholarly Essays about the Urantia Revelation (Origin Press/Academic, 2024). We should all be grateful to the good folks at Second Miler Grant Program for generously funding it.

The fifteen pieces in this anthology were chosen because they showcase genuine scholarship or in-depth research that has been published by UB-aware scholars and thinkers going back to 1960; many were also chosen because they are introductory without being doctrinaire. This collection covers most aspects of the revelation other than its cosmology and science, which will be handled in a future anthology. 

Aside from their rigor and good quality, I selected these essays because they are suited for readers who are new to the UB and in most cases provide such inquirers with a helpful bridge to contemporary knowledge outside the Urantia text. I worked with a small team, and it was our further intention that this anthology would inspire scholarly studies in the coming years that serve as valid contributions to the aforementioned fields, or might serve well for classroom use in these areas of study alongside Reason and Revelation or similar textbooks that will hopefully be forthcoming.

Rebuffed for Advocacy of Urantia Book study

As I write this in early 2024, the publication of scholarly works in venues not solely intended for the Urantia reader-believer community are very rare. Such an endeavor has understandably been perilous for academics and professional researchers, and I myself have felt the sting of being rebuffed several times for my advocacy of UB study in academia. 

My dear friends, let’s face it. Because of its claim to be revelatory information of epochal significance, The Urantia Book is often regarded as disruptive or even transgressive—especially by mainstream scholars. The fact that the revelators even incorporated human sources that were themselves scholars does not seem to have mitigated this problem. And it is for this reason that three of the anthology’s most significant contributors chose to use pseudonyms. This is a sad reality but again, quite understandable. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that almost all deep students of our epochal revelation prefer to write for the wider community of UB students, thus avoiding controversy, rejection, and even professional ostracism that could destroy their careers. 

But we are now breaking out of the closet, so to speak, and I am especially grateful to Gard Jameson for his excellent essay contribution that is published under his name: “The First Two Beatitudes: The Bedrock of Attitudinal Transformation.” Aside from the four excellent pseudonymous essays, I included strong essays from several deceased Urantia scholars, including Dr. Meredith Sprunger, Dr. Bill Sadler, and Bill Sadler, Jr., and I selected three of my own pieces for the anthology (including “The Human Sources and the Problem of Fallibility”), while also authoring the introductory materials, appendices, and glossary. 

Some of the more original essays to be found in the book include: “Philosophy of Living as a Path to Love,” “The Urantia Book and the Apostle Paul,” “The Great Transition: The Catholic Response to the Urantia Revelation,” and “Do All Ascenders Survive?”

Reason and Revelation is an early effort to put an end to the sharp division between the little-known Urantia community and the wider intelligentsia of today’s society, and let’s hope it marks the beginning of a new era of writing, thinking, deep research, and teaching and that meets the needs of the global academic community.

Byron Belitsos has been a student of the revelation since 1974, and holds a degree in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He now lives in Washington, DC. He can be reached at: byron@originpress.com

Reason and Revelation: Scholarly Essays about the Urantia Revelation is available at Amazon.

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