Matthew Block, Saskia Praamsma
Description
The Urantia Diaries of Clarence Bowman is a document of foremost value for the study of the history of the Urantia Papers. It is the second set of dia
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ries we have published that provide on-the-scene accounts of meetings of the Forum, the first being The Urantia Diaries of Harold and Martha Sherman. The Forum, formed by Chicago physician William S. Sadler in 1923, was the group that heard and read the evolving manuscript that was published in 1955 as The Urantia Book, a book that purports to be an epochal revelation from superhuman beings. Clarence Bowman, a man from small-town Kentucky who worked for the Railway Mail Service, regularly attended the Forum from 1923 to 1931 and from 1943 to 1956, and made intermittent visits between 1931 and 1943. He also belonged to the First Urantia Society, the successor to the Forum, until his death in 1959.
In 1955, when one of the leaders of the secretive Urantia organizations learned of Clarence’s diaries, he asked that they be destroyed. Fortunately, Clarence kept them and they were held by his family for sixty-five years after his death. Now, finally released, the diaries set the record straight on the first several years of the Forum, exposing the deficiencies of the current histories of the Urantia phenomenon and providing vital details that otherwise would have been lost.
Although we have included only the diary entries that pertain to Urantia, all these entries contain information about Clarence Bowman’s daily life, which is interesting in its own right. Through these invaluable diaries, the reader is taken on a thirty-five-year journey of an ordinary man involved with an extraordinary phenomenon.
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