When Stories Die: Christianity's Crisis and the Urantia Papers

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 21:37:19 -0400

When Stories Die: Christianity's Crisis and the Urantia Papers

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This film provides an introduction to the Urantia Papers for progressive clergy and lay leaders concerned with declining church attendance and the continuing deterioration of Christianity's supportive stories. For disillusioned Christians, it provides an introduction to a post-doctrinal world view that expands the transcendent meanings and spiritual values of the Incarnation of Jesus. For experienced readers of the revelation, it provides an engaging perspective on the evolutionary heritage into which the Urantia Papers are being introduced.

Christianity's crisis is the loss of its supportive stories. While Christian spirituality is alive and thriving, the Enlightenment, the Scientific revolution, multiculturalism, secularism, and postmodern philosophy have all eroded Christianity's contextualizing narrative to such an extent that Christianity--as well as contemporary spirituality--has become increasingly existential, marooned in a rapidly expanding cosmos. The morality, religion, and philosophy in our troubled world are increasingly fragmented and subjective. The human Jesus has been lost in a cloud of metaphysical speculation. Social cohesion is rapidly fading. Christianity is adrift without a story linking spirituality with evolutionary experience in time and space.

The Urantia Papers provide a revitalization of the archetypes of the Christian story, along with a compelling vision of a spiritually informed civilization. It gives us an authoritative background review of our planetary origins, anthropological and religious history, and our cosmic destiny.

Key divisions of the film:

00:00:00 Start

00:01:10 Nature of the Problem

00:05:30 From Incarnation to Story

00:13:56 Augustine: Story Consolidated

00:16:58 Seedflight: The Story Spreads

00:24:03 Celtic Christianity and Brigid of Kildare

00:30:57 The Spiritual Awakening in the High Middle Ages

00:39:07 Thomas Aquinas

00:41:59 The Perilous Price of Devotion

00:53:33 Story Displaced: The Scientific Revolution

01:00:43 Story Forsaken: The Enlightenment

01:05:32 Dissident Sects, Religious Wars, Escape to America

01:13:05 Hybrid Christianities of the 19th Century

01:21:44 A New Story About the Story:

The Urantia Papers The Urantia Papers, a revelation of epochal significance, revitalize the archetypes and narratives of the Christian story and illuminate a pathway forward for theology, practice, and the deepening of personal spiritual experience.

Our Universe Journey

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 22:34:40 -0400

Our Universe Journey

WATCH ON YOUTUBE

A vision of mortal destiny: Stan Hartman reviews the journey from our planet of origin (Urantia), through the universe to Paradise at the center of all things. Based on the cosmology of The Urantia Book, it's a journey upon which we each have already embarked.

UrantiaBookFilms

What do we do now???

Sun, 28 Jan 2018 20:31:53 -0500

What do we do now???

Published on Oct 30, 2015

A 50-year veteran of the Urantia movement assesses the current state of the movement and its primary organizations on the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Urantia Book. With almost 1,000,000 copies of the book now in circulation in 16 languages, the movement is crossing the threshold into a completely new phase of development unlike anything experienced by any new religious movement before it.

A mixed media presentation produced for the Urantia Book Los Angeles Society, presented at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Anaheim, California.

About the Author

SpiritualFamily.Net: David Kantor's videos

When Stories Die: Christianity's Crisis and the Urantia Papers

When Stories Die: Christianity's Crisis and the Urantia Papers

Our Universe Journey

What do we do now???