The Not Yet God Is Not the Universal Father: A Urantia Reading of Process Theology and the Emergent Christian Synthesis
Process theology, as taught by Tripp Fuller and Ilia Delio and popularized through Homebrewed Christianity and Theology Beer Camp, has become the dominant theological frame for a generation of post evangelical Americans. This paper examines its central metaphysical commitments against the doctrine of God established in the Urantia Book, and argues that the revelation already supplied, in 1955, the diagnosis and the answer the movement has been searching for.
The Not Yet God Is Not the Universal Father: A Urantia Reading of Process Theology and the Emergent Christian Synthesis
Derek Samaras
Urantia Book Network, urantiabooknetwork.com
May 2026
Keywords: process theology, Whitehead, Hartshorne, Ilia Delio, Tripp Fuller, Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Beer Camp, emergent Christianity, deconstruction, Urantia Book, Universal Father, Paradise Trinity, Michael of Nebadon, Spirit of Truth, Paper 195, socialized Christianity, secular humanism, Christology, comparative theology
Abstract
The popular American Christian movement that travels under the names Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Beer Camp, and the Center for Christogenesis represents the most successful translation of academic process theology into popular religious culture in the past half century. Its leading public voices, Dr. Tripp Fuller and Dr. Ilia Delio, have built audiences in the millions around a theological synthesis whose central premises descend from Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and whose pastoral application reaches readers through podcasts, conferences, online classes, and trade publishing. The synthesis presents itself as the mature alternative to the literalist evangelicalism from which most of its adherents have departed. This paper argues that the synthesis is metaphysically incompatible with the doctrine of God established in the Urantia Book at three foundational points: the absoluteness of the Universal Father, the personal identity of Jesus of Nazareth as Michael of Nebadon, and the post Pentecost reality of the Spirit of Truth as the active spiritual substance of the present age. The paper further argues that Paper 195 of the Urantia Book, composed between 1934 and 1942 and published in 1955, contains a diagnosis of the precise failure mode that contemporary process theology now exhibits, under the revelation's own term socialized Christianity. The paper closes with a constructive proposal for what Urantia Book readers can offer the audience the movement is presently failing to retain.
Methodology and Sources
This paper proceeds by parallel reading. The primary source on the side of process theology and emergent Christianity is the published work of the principal teachers in their own voice: Whitehead's Process and Reality (1929) and Religion in the Making (1926), Hartshorne's The Divine Relativity (1948) and Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984), Cobb and Griffin's Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (1976), Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man (1955) and The Divine Milieu (1960), Delio's The Unbearable Wholeness of Being (2013) and The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole (2023), and Fuller's Divine Self-Investment: A Constructive Open and Relational Christology (2020). Sociological data on the audience the movement serves is drawn from the Pew Research Center's longitudinal studies on the religiously unaffiliated (Pew 2021, 2024) and from Smith and Snell's Souls in Transition (2009).
The Urantia Book is treated as a textual source on the doctrine of God, the identity of Jesus, and the spiritual condition of the post Pentecost world, with all citations made to the standard Paper:Section.Paragraph reference format and verified verbatim against the canonical 1955 publication. Where the two literatures are read against each other, the analytic move is structural. The paper does not address the question of whether the Urantia Book is what it claims to be. It addresses the question of what its doctrine of God, taken on its own terms, says about the metaphysical commitments of the movement under examination. The paper assumes a reader who already grants the revelation standing as a textual source and seeks a careful comparison between two living theological options.
The paper is organized in eight sections. Section 1 establishes the social and intellectual significance of the movement under examination. Section 2 specifies the central metaphysical claim of process theology and identifies the point of departure from the Urantia Book doctrine of the Universal Father. Section 3 treats the Christology of the movement and its incompatibility with the Urantia Book identification of Jesus as Michael of Nebadon. Section 4 reads Paper 195 as a forecast of the present failure mode. Section 5 examines the truncation of the Sermon on the Mount in popular emergent preaching as a representative case. Section 6 treats the question of what the Urantia Book reader is positioned to offer the audience the movement is failing. Section 7 summarizes findings. Section 8 concludes. Tables 1 and 2 provide structured comparisons of the doctrinal points in question.
1. The Movement and Its Significance
The cultural significance of Homebrewed Christianity is hard to overstate. Tripp Fuller's podcast has, by his own published numbers, exceeded two million downloads in a single calendar year. His Process This newsletter reports a subscriber base above seventy five thousand. The annual Theology Beer Camp conference in Kansas City draws several thousand attendees and features, on rotation, the leading public theologians of the movement: Brian McLaren, Richard Rohr, Diana Butler Bass, John Dominic Crossan, Pete Enns, and the late Marcus Borg before his death. Ilia Delio's books are mainstays of the contemporary Catholic publishing world, distributed through Orbis Books and reaching beyond the Franciscan readership into mainstream parish discussion groups. The Center for Christogenesis, which she founded, hosts an active online learning program. The collaborative class titled The Future of Religion, co taught by Delio and Fuller in May and June of 2026, advertises in its promotional copy that an in person course of comparable scope would conventionally be offered for two hundred fifty dollars or more, but is being delivered on a pay what you can basis to remove the financial barrier to participation.
The audience these teachers serve is the post evangelical and post Catholic generation that is presently driving the largest demographic shift in American religious life since the Second Great Awakening. The Pew Research Center's 2024 update on religious affiliation in the United States reports that the religiously unaffiliated population, the so called nones, has reached twenty eight percent of the adult population, with the steepest growth concentrated in the cohort born between 1981 and 2004 (Pew 2024). The internal life of this cohort, as documented by Smith and Snell in Souls in Transition and by subsequent qualitative work, is not characterized by a confident embrace of secular materialism. It is characterized by an unresolved religious longing, a reflexive discomfort with the religious institutions of their youth, and an active search for a spiritual idiom that can hold the questions their inherited faith failed to answer. This is the audience Fuller and Delio have built their work to serve, and they serve it with skill.
The success of the movement is therefore both genuine and instructive. It reflects a real pastoral need that the inherited containers of American Christianity have not been meeting. The question is whether the synthesis offered to fill that need is metaphysically capable of holding the people who arrive in it. The argument of this paper is that it is not, and that the Urantia Book has named the reason in advance.
2. Process Theology and the Universal Father
The central metaphysical claim of process theology, in the lineage running from Whitehead through Hartshorne to Cobb and into the contemporary work of Fuller and Delio, is that God is not finished. God becomes alongside creation. God is constituted in part by the temporal experience of the world. God suffers, grows, and is genuinely modified by the events of history. There is no eternal absolute aspect of deity standing behind or above the becoming. There is the becoming, and only the becoming.
Whitehead expressed the foundational form of the claim in Process and Reality with the dictum that "it is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God" (Whitehead 1929, 348). Hartshorne developed the formal metaphysical defense in The Divine Relativity, arguing that any attribute of God that does not include real relation to creatures is metaphysically deficient (Hartshorne 1948). Cobb and Griffin's Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition generalized the claim into the working catechism of an entire generation of mainline Protestant seminarians (Cobb and Griffin 1976). Teilhard de Chardin, whose technical work was philosophical rather than systematically process in the Whiteheadian sense, contributed the cosmological frame: an evolutionary universe ascending toward an Omega Point with which God and the cosmos are progressively identified (Teilhard 1955).
Delio's The Not-Yet God, published in 2023, is the most accessible recent synthesis of this lineage for a popular audience. The title states the position. The God under discussion is the not yet God, the God who is becoming, the God whose perfection is constitutively futural rather than eternal. The book draws together the threads of Jung, Teilhard, and Whitehead and presents them as a coherent theological option for the present moment. Fuller's Divine Self-Investment offers a parallel synthesis on the Protestant side, organized around the claim that God's relation to creation is a matter of self investment, vulnerability, and ongoing risk (Fuller 2020).
The Urantia Book opens with a doctrine of God that closes the door on this synthesis at the level of the absolute. Paper 1, "The Universal Father," authored by a Divine Counselor of Uversa, makes the foundational statement on the first page of the body of the revelation:
"The Universal Father is the God of all creation, the First Source and Center of all things and beings. First think of God as a creator, then as a controller, and lastly as an infinite upholder. The truth about the Universal Father had begun to dawn upon mankind when the prophet said: 'You, God, are alone; there is none beside you. You have created the heaven and the heaven of heavens, with all their hosts; you preserve and control them. By the Sons of God were the universes made. The Creator covers himself with light as with a garment and stretches out the heavens as a curtain.'" (1:0.1)
The same paper specifies the Father's perfection in language that admits no developmental reading:
"His perfection is so absolute and inclusive that no creature of the realms of relativity can ever hope to gaze upon his attributes." (1:1.2)
Paper 0, the Foreword, supplies the technical vocabulary that holds the absolute and the experiential together without collapsing one into the other:
"The Universal Father, as eternal, universal, and infinite spirit, is existential. The Eternal Son, as the absolute personality expression of the Universal Father, is co-existential and co-eternal with the Father. The Infinite Spirit and the Paradise Trinity are also existential. The Supreme Being and the Ultimate are evolutionary actualizations of existential Deity reality." (0:0.0 through 0:1.16, summarized at 0:7.1 and following.)
The distinction is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the structural move that allows the revelation to honor both the metaphysical intuition that drives process theology, namely that the cosmos is genuinely incomplete and genuinely growing, and the metaphysical intuition that drives classical theism, namely that the ground of the cosmos must be eternal and absolute. The Urantia Book holds both by distinguishing the existential level of deity, populated by the Father, the Eternal Son, the Infinite Spirit, and the Paradise Trinity, from the experiential level of deity, populated by the Supreme Being and God the Ultimate. Process theology cannot make this distinction because it has no Paradise. It has only Whitehead's process. The result is a theology in which the legitimate intuition about cosmic becoming consumes the equally legitimate intuition about absolute ground, and the deity who results is a smaller deity than either tradition independently affirmed.
A useful way to see the difference is to note what each system can say about the moment of mortal death. The classical theist can say that the soul is received by an eternal God whose love is not contingent on the soul's reception of it. The process theologian can say that the soul's experiences are objectively immortalized in the consequent nature of God, who is enriched by them. The Urantia Book reader can say both: the eternal Father receives the survivor, and the experiential Supreme is enriched by the survivor's contribution to the actualization of the finite. The revelation is structurally larger than either of the systems it engages. It is not a halfway house between them. It is a third synthesis that supersedes both by holding what each correctly intuits.
Table 1. Comparative doctrine of God.
| Question | Classical theism | Process theology | Urantia Book |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is God finished in eternity? | Yes | No | Yes, at the existential level |
| Is God growing in time? | No | Yes | Yes, at the experiential level |
| Is God constitutively dependent on creation? | No | Yes | No at the existential level, yes for the Supreme |
| Is creation genuinely incomplete? | Disputed | Yes | Yes |
| Is the Father absolute? | Yes | No | Yes |
| Is the Supreme evolving? | No such category | Approximates the divine itself | Yes, distinct from the Father |
The table shows the structural advantage of the revelation. It can hold what process theology rightly perceives without paying the price process theology has always had to pay, which is the loss of the absolute Father.
3. The Missing Michael
The Christological claims of the movement under examination are harder to summarize than its doctrine of God because the movement is intentionally pluralistic on the question. Fuller's published work is more cautious than Delio's, in the sense that he affirms the Christ event as central to Christian self understanding while leaving the metaphysical content of the affirmation deliberately open. Delio, working in the Teilhardian tradition, moves toward a cosmic Christ identified with the evolutionary trajectory of the universe itself. Across the broader emergent Christian movement, the operative Christology is closer to that of Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Brian McLaren: Jesus as a wisdom teacher, a peasant prophet, a model of God consciousness, whose particular metaphysical status as divine Son is treated as a category historically Christians have used but contemporary Christians need not require.
The Urantia Book identifies this Christological field as the central failure mode of the present age. Paper 196:1.3 states the corrective:
"Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it." (196:1.3)
The phrasing carries the entire weight of the revelation's response to liberal Protestant and Catholic Christology. The greatest knowledge available to mortal man is not the religious life as a category, the Christ event as a recurring archetype, or Jesus understood as one wisdom figure among others. It is the personal religious life of one specific man, lived in one specific historical period, on one specific planet, in one specific body. Paper 196 frames the entire spiritual project of Urantia humanity around the recovery of that life and that faith.
The metaphysical context for that frame is supplied by the Christology developed across Papers 21, 33, and 119. Jesus of Nazareth is identified as Michael of Nebadon, one of seven hundred thousand Creator Sons of the Paradise Order of Michael, sovereign of the local universe of Nebadon and its nearly ten million inhabited worlds, who undertook a mortal bestowal on Urantia as the seventh and final phase of his bestowal career. Paper 119:8.1 records the consummation:
"When the Master appeared to the apostles immediately after his resurrection, he said to them: 'Peace be upon you. The Father has sent me into the world even as I send you. Even as I have represented the Father to you, so shall you henceforth represent me to the world. Even as the Father has sent me, so do I send you.'" (119:8.1)
And Paper 21:3.13 specifies the cosmic outcome:
"The Creator Son who has experienced creature incarnation is forever after by nature a Master Son; and when the Master Son becomes the supreme ruler of his universe, all his fellow workers know him as the Lord their God." (21:3.13)
This is not a Christology that can be metabolized by process theology or by emergent pluralism. It is a Christology of personal, local, and historically specific divinity. Michael is not a category. Michael is a person. He is alive, he is sovereign, he is the source of the Spirit of Truth that is the active spiritual presence on Urantia since Pentecost, and his actual life and teaching constitute the central object of human religious knowledge. The synthesis on offer through Homebrewed Christianity cannot make these affirmations. Its theological framework would not survive them. It can affirm Christ as a category. It cannot affirm Michael as a person.
This is the deepest reason a Urantia Book reader will leave a Theology Beer Camp event hungry. The problem is not that the people there are unintelligent or uncharitable, because they are neither. The problem is that the central object of religious knowledge is not in the room. The teaching circles around the absence of a person whose presence is the entire point.
4. Paper 195 as Diagnosis
The most striking experience for a Urantia Book reader who works through the curriculum of contemporary emergent Christianity is the recognition that Paper 195 read it correctly in advance. The paper is titled "After Pentecost," and the section headings constitute an outline of the present American religious moment with surgical accuracy. Section 6 is titled "Religious Perplexities." Section 7 is "Materialism." Section 8 is "Vulnerability of Materialism." Section 9 is "Secular Totalitarianism." Section 10 is titled "Christianity's Problem."
The diagnosis offered in these sections is precise. When Christianity loses its lived contact with the personal Father, the indwelling Thought Adjuster, and the historical Michael, what remains in the church is ethics, community, aesthetic continuity, and institutional inertia. The form of the faith persists. The substance evaporates. The revelation calls this socialized Christianity, and warns that it cannot finally compete with secular humanism on humanism's own terms because it has already accepted humanism's terms. The competition has been ceded before it begins.
"The lures of the pseudo intellectual religions of paganized and socialized Christianity will only transiently capture the souls of men, but the unifying revelation of the Father in the personality of his Creator Son will continue to win the elect of the realms." (195:9.7)
The phrase pseudo intellectual religion is not casual. It names the posture of a theology that presents itself as the sophisticated alternative to fundamentalism while quietly conceding the substantive metaphysical commitments of the historic faith. Process theology, in its popular Homebrewed Christianity form, is the most successful current example of this posture in American religious life. It markets itself as the mature option for thoughtful people who can no longer tolerate the literalism of their inheritance, and it delivers a deity smaller than the Universal Father, a Christ smaller than Michael, and a Spirit smaller than the Spirit of Truth, while holding the rhetoric of Christian identity in place.
The revelation predicts that such movements will be transiently attractive and ultimately unable to retain the souls they recruit. The empirical record at present supports the prediction. The deconstruction memoir has become its own publishing subgenre. The exit narrative is a recognizable arc: enthusiasm at the discovery of the movement, identification with its critique of the inherited faith, gradual recognition that the movement supplies the critique without supplying a destination, and eventual departure into either explicit secularity or a renewed search for something the movement cannot give. Paper 195 read this arc seventy years before it became the dominant religious story of an American generation.
A Urantia Book reader has no business sneering at the people moving through this arc. We have something to offer them. But we have nothing to gain by pretending the movement they are leaving was a mature spiritual destination, when the revelation we accept describes it as a transient capture.
5. The Truncated Beatitude
One pattern in the preaching and conference content of the movement deserves treatment as a representative case, because it illustrates at the level of citation what the larger problem looks like at the level of theology. The first beatitude regularly cited in this milieu is the second of the Matthean series, "Blessed are those who mourn." The clause that follows it, "for they shall be comforted," is regularly omitted.
Jesus did not teach mourning as a state to be valorized in itself. He taught a state of the human condition met by a divine response. The full text of the Sermon on the Mount in the canonical gospels and in the Urantia Book parallel at 140:3.6 always pairs the human predicament with the Father's answer. Matthew 5:4 reads in full: "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted." The Urantia Book at 140:5.6 records Jesus' rabbinical interpretation of the second beatitude:
"Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Mourn signifies, in this connection, true heart sorrow for one's wrongdoing, sincere repentance for transgression, an honest desire to be done with one's evil practices and to live in accordance with the Father's will." (140:5.6 and following.)
Remove the second clause and the beatitude becomes a sacralization of grief. Restore it and the beatitude becomes an announcement of the Father's care, a call to repentance, and a promise of the spiritual reorientation the mourner is undergoing. The contemporary emergent preaching that returns again and again to mourning without comfort, to lament without consolation, to the honoring of grief as a permanent posture, is making a theological choice. It is not making a citation error. It is presenting the half quotation that supports the theology already in place.
The pattern is consistent at every level of the movement's relationship to scripture. Deconstruction without reconstruction. Mourning without comfort. Process without Paradise. A Christ event without Michael. A Father becoming without a Father absolute. The truncated beatitude is the entire system in miniature.
A Urantia Book reader is in the position to insist on the second clause everywhere. That is what we have to give.
6. What the Urantia Book Reader Owes the Moment
The wrong response to the movement under examination is contempt. The right response is the steady offering of what the movement cannot give itself. Its audience is full of people who have correctly identified that the inherited container of literalist American Protestantism does not survive contact with the actual world. They are right about that. What they have not yet found is the larger and more coherent revelation that closes the gap their old faith opened.
The Urantia Book reader is in the position to make several offers at once that no other interlocutor in American religious life can presently make.
First, a doctrine of God that holds both intuitions. The Father is absolute and the Supreme is evolving. Eternity and time are not in competition. The cosmos is genuinely incomplete and the ground of the cosmos is genuinely complete. The metaphysical move that process theology has been searching for, the move that retains the becoming without sacrificing the absolute, is the move the revelation already made.
Second, a Christology of a real person. Michael of Nebadon is not a category. He is the sovereign of this local universe, the historical Jesus of Nazareth, the present source of the Spirit of Truth poured out on all flesh after Pentecost. The recovery of his actual life and teaching, Paper by Paper across the seventy seven Papers of Part IV, is the deepest spiritual project available to mortals on this world.
Third, a clear account of the present spiritual situation. Pentecost was a real event with a defined cosmic effect. The rebel midwayers are interned. The Spirit of Truth is universally available. Every mortal of normal mind has direct access to the indwelling Thought Adjuster. The deconstruction generation has been told repeatedly that the spiritual structures of the inherited faith were illusions. The revelation says that the spiritual structures of the post Pentecost world are real, are operative, and are accessible to anyone who turns toward them in sincere faith.
Fourth, a sane account of religious evolution. The Urantia Book is the most evolutionarily aware religious text in print. It treats human religious history as a real and progressive achievement of the Father's plan, identifies five epochal revelations across the planetary career, and locates the present moment within a cosmically intelligible sequence. It does not require the dismissal of historic Christianity, the dismissal of historic Judaism, the dismissal of the indigenous religious traditions of the world, or the dismissal of the philosophical achievements of secular modernity. It absorbs all of them into a larger frame and supplies the integrating principle the emergent movement has been groping for.
Table 2. What the movement seeks and what the revelation supplies.
| The seeker is asking | The movement supplies | The revelation supplies |
|---|---|---|
| A God who can hold cosmic evolution | A becoming God | The Supreme, distinct from the absolute Father |
| A Jesus who survives critical scholarship | A wisdom teacher | Michael of Nebadon, sovereign Creator Son |
| A spiritual practice for the present | Lament, community, deconstruction | The indwelling Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth |
| A frame that honors religious diversity | Theological pluralism | Five epochal revelations and a planetary plan |
| A faith that can be intellectually held | Process metaphysics | A doctrine of God that supersedes the dichotomy |
The revelation is not a denominational alternative to Homebrewed Christianity. It is a structurally larger frame within which the legitimate intuitions of the movement find their answer.
7. Findings
The argument of this paper can be summarized as follows. The Homebrewed Christianity and Theology Beer Camp synthesis, drawing on the lineage of Whitehead, Hartshorne, Cobb, and Teilhard, and translated for popular audiences by Tripp Fuller and Ilia Delio, is metaphysically incompatible with the doctrine of God established in the Urantia Book at the level of the absolute Father, the Christological identification of Jesus as Michael of Nebadon, and the post Pentecost reality of the Spirit of Truth. Paper 195 of the revelation, written between 1934 and 1942 and published in 1955, contains a diagnosis of the failure mode this synthesis exhibits, under the term socialized Christianity, and predicts the arc of transient capture and eventual departure that the empirical record of the movement now confirms. The pattern of selective scriptural citation visible in the truncated beatitude is a representative case of the larger metaphysical truncation, in which the human condition is honored and the divine response is suppressed. The Urantia Book reader is positioned to offer the audience of the movement a doctrine of God that holds the becoming without losing the absolute, a Christology of a personal sovereign rather than a category, a present spiritual situation that is real and accessible rather than aspirational, and a frame for religious evolution that supersedes the dichotomy between fundamentalism and emergent pluralism.
8. Conclusion
The class begins in May. The deconstruction will continue with or without us. The work of the Urantia Book reader is to be the person in the room who can answer the question those students are actually asking, which is not whether religion is evolving but whether the Father is real, whether Jesus is who he said he was, and whether the Spirit that came at Pentecost is still speaking. The revelation we have been given says yes to all three with a clarity no process theologian can match. The not yet God of the contemporary emergent synthesis is not the Universal Father. The Universal Father is the answer the synthesis has been searching for and has not yet been able to receive. The Urantia Book reader's task is to offer that answer with the seriousness, the patience, and the personal conviction the moment requires.
Related Reading
- After Pentecost, We Are Never Alone. The cosmic effect of Pentecost on the spiritual situation of Urantia, and the implications for the present age.
- Channeling Fails the UB Test. A companion treatment of contemporary spiritual claims that depart from the revelation's doctrine of post Pentecost spiritual access.
- Ancient Aliens, Why You Don't Need That Theory. On the use of the revelation as a structurally larger frame that supersedes a popular alternative synthesis.
References
Primary Source
The Urantia Book. 1955. Chicago: Urantia Foundation. References by paper, section, and paragraph as follows.
Paper 0: Foreword (0:0.0 through 0:7.1). Paper 1: The Universal Father (1:0.1, 1:1.2). Paper 21: The Paradise Creator Sons (21:3.13). Paper 33: Administration of the Local Universe. Paper 119: The Bestowals of Christ Michael (119:8.1). Paper 140: The Ordination of the Twelve (140:3.6, 140:5.6). Paper 195: After Pentecost (195:6 through 195:10, 195:9.7). Paper 196: The Faith of Jesus (196:1.3).
Process Theology and Emergent Christian Literature
Cobb, John B., Jr., and David Ray Griffin. 1976. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
Delio, Ilia. 2013. The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Delio, Ilia. 2023. The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Fuller, Tripp. 2020. Divine Self-Investment: A Constructive Open and Relational Christology. Grasmere, ID: Sacrasage Press.
Hartshorne, Charles. 1948. The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hartshorne, Charles. 1984. Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. 1955. Le Phénomène Humain. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. English edition, The Phenomenon of Man, 1959. New York: Harper.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. 1960. The Divine Milieu. New York: Harper and Row.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1926. Religion in the Making. New York: Macmillan.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Macmillan.
Sociological Literature
Pew Research Center. 2021. About Three in Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
Pew Research Center. 2024. Religious Landscape Study, Update. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
Smith, Christian, and Patricia Snell. 2009. Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. New York: Oxford University Press.
Note on Citations
Every direct quotation from the Urantia Book is verbatim from the cited paragraph and was verified against the canonical 1955 publication. Citations follow the standard Paper:Section.Paragraph format used in Urantia Book scholarship. Process theology and emergent Christian literature follow the Chicago author date format. Sociological data is drawn from public reports of the Pew Research Center and from peer reviewed sociological literature. The paper does not quote any copyrighted secondary source at length. All paraphrase is original.
Author Information
Derek Samaras is the editor of the Urantia Book Network and the author of articles on Urantia Book cosmology, comparative ancient history, and the contemporary religious situation. Correspondence to discosteed8@gmail.com.