Mustard Seed Grant Project—Urantiapedia

By José Antonio Hernández, Valladolid, Spain

Editor's Note: José was a recipient of the first round of Mustard Seed Grants awarded in 2023. The grant funded an open-source online Urantiapedia, a site intended to help readers navigate the complexities of the fifth epochal revelation. The following article is excerpted from his final report to Urantia Foundation.  

The complexity of The Urantia Book is not lost on anyone who comes across it for the first time. The 196 papers, filled solely with text, and without illustrations, maps, footnotes, or diagrams, are daunting for most new readers. Many give up, depriving themselves of the greatest concentration of truth ever assembled in a single volume. Our dream was to help make this deep, rich, and diverse text available in a way that resolves doubts and avoids confusion.

During the past two years, we focused our efforts on several goals: to offer free, varied, and interconnected content that allows for better understanding; to provide centralized access to this content; to make it available in multiple languages; and to create a community of readers to sustain the project.

The content incudes an archive of publications related to The Urantia Book from Urantia Foundation, The Urantia Book Fellowship, Urantia Association International, and other groups and individuals. Two years was not enough time to include everything since the number of publications is enormous, and it is often difficult to obtain copies of older ones. As of this writing, the archive lists almost 5,000 articles from 20 different sources.

We also created a library of relevant books, including the Bible; extra-biblical and apocryphal books; books from the world's major religions; books that are presumed to have been used by the revelators; and even books written by readers. The collection currently contains 280 titles, which is a fraction of all the books that can be compiled from these categories. But it is a respectable start.

As the name Urantiapedia suggests, we also created a first-of-its-kind encyclopedia, which now boasts 4,400 entries. There is a page for every concept, idea, and proper name that appears in The Urantia Book. The information is presented horizontally, summarizing everything related throughout the book for each concept, thus allowing readers a better overview of each topic.

Last, but not least, we created a linking system that interconnects the content, all of which is available in English, French, and Spanish. Yes, it is massive! The number of links to date has exceeded everyone's expectations, totaling 38,000, and we are just getting started.

The Urantiapedia project is ambitious, and it has taken much longer than expected. However, the journey has allowed us to learn important lessons. Not only have we found many useful tools, and even generated a few tricks to facilitate the processes, we have gained a vast amount of experience that we can use to better plan future content expansions.

The establishment of a community of collaborators around Urantiapedia is vital to ensuring the future of this project. The ultimate goal is continued growth, even with small increments. Only by ensuring its future will we achieve a tool that will prove invaluable to future generations of readers of the fifth epochal revelation.

View Urantiapedia here: https://urantiapedia.org/en/home

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