Recent Stories

Pato Banton

A Conversation With Pato Banton

Pato Banton says that “I think every situation that a child is brought up into becomes normal for them.” Hearing him reflect on his childhood in London reveals a “normal” most of us would find deeply traumatizing.

Media Bias Chart for Urantia Voice

Probing our Freedom of Bias

Each of us have our daily news go-to’s.

Being aware of our favorite news sources’ biases is as important as keeping up with events around us, probably more important. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

herzog bells urantia

Listening for Herzog’s Bells from the Deep

Bells From the Deep takes us on a journey—at times profoundly aesthetic—into a seldom seen religious and mystical world where we observe a wide range of men and women, each engaged in his or her own quest for what Herzog might consider to be “ecstatic truth.”

Righteous Mind Chart

This Chart Says A Lot About Us

Over ten years ago, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wanted to figure out why there were such great political and religious divides in all cultures. This little chart summarizes some big insights Haidt and his researchers uncovered.

Wafflehouse Victims

We Should Not Be Seeing These Pictures

Akilah Sasilva, Taurean C. Sanderlin, DeEbony Groves, and Joe R. Perez. These young people
should be going about their lives in relative anonymity, attending
school, working, and dreaming. And unless one of these individuals is a
friend or a loved one, you should not be seeing these images. But here we are again. Innocent people gunned down at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee, and we’re viewing people’s images we would not have seen otherwise.

Salvation for an Atheist

A tearful little boy approached Pope Francis
last week with a question about his atheist dad who had recently died. Traditional Christian doctrine teaches that belief in God through Jesus
is essential to life after death. But Pope Francis spoke a more personal
truth about God to this distraught child, who was escorted up to the
Pope after he could not speak his question into a microphone. “Is Dad in heaven?” the boy asked the Pope, whispering in his ear.

Who Has It the Roughest?

Toni Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, at age 39. For
a long time she had wanted to read a book about “the most vulnerable
person in society…and it wasn’t around, so I started writing it,” she
told Hilton Als in a 2014 interview. Ms. Morrison’s most vulnerable person: female, child, black. I live in the opposite end of that vulnerability spectrum: male, middle-aged, white. I have been broke and unemployed, but I’ve never experienced the abject vulnerability of a little girl in South Sudan.

Blue Butterfly

Sunday, April 9, 30 CE: The Resurrection

Sunday, April 9, 30 CEThe Resurrection

189:4.3 (2025.4) A little before three o’clock this Sunday morning, when the first signs of day began to appear in the east, five of the women started out for the tomb of Jesus. They had prepared an abundance of special embalming lotions, and they carried many linen bandages with them. It was their purpose more thoroughly to give the body of Jesus its death anointing and more carefully to wrap it up with the new bandages.  

189:4.4 (2025.5) The women who went on this mission of anointing Jesus’ body were: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of the Alpheus twins, Salome the mother of the Zebedee brothers, Joanna the wife of Chuza, and Susanna the daughter of Ezra of Alexandria. 189:4.5 (2025.6) It was about half past three o’clock when the five women, laden with their ointments, arrived before the empty tomb.