Advisory Board

Lisa Rae Crowe

Lisa Crowe discovered The Urantia Book in the summer of 2007, and since that day her life has taken a dramatic turn…for the best!  Enthralled and excited about the Fifth Epochal Revelation, priorities in life began shifting quickly.  Every spare minute became consumed with study to learn as much about the Revelation as quickly as possible.  At the same time she was also “home-schooling” herself in web design, hoping to eventually be able to work from home on her ranchette in Texas.   By spring of 2008, Lisa made the bold decision to abandon the financial security of her career in the corporate world in order to focus much more time on her studies.  As her skills in web design improved, it seemed like a natural fit to use the web to help introduce the UB to others. She created the site urantiabook-intro.org to serve that purpose.

Bob Debold

Joe DiMaggio

Joe DiMaggio discovered The Urantia Book in the early 90’s as the result of “an unusual set of circumstances” and, having gotten the clue, he’s been following it ever since. He is now retired from work as an Information Technology professional. When he saw the UBtheNEWS website and then learned that Halbert had sold off everything he owned to jumpstart the project, Joe was moved to contribute his time and expertise as a webmaster for absurdly small amounts of money during its second and third years of operation. Having now helped Halbert get set up to manage most of the additions to the website himself, Joe now hosts the website and acts as a technical consultant whenever his expertise is needed.

Joe is the UAF Membership Chair and Study Group Coordinator. He recently helped set up a new UAUS chapter in Florida and attends study groups in the Jacksonville area.

Polly Friedman

Lynn Goodwin

Gard Jameson

Gard is a current member of Urantia Foundation's Board of Trustees.

In 1972 he bought a copy of The Urantia Book in a California bookstore near Stanford University, where he was studying Comparative Religion. It was like no other book that he had been familiar with in either philosophy or religion. His friend Brian, a fellow student, borrowed it and responded by saying, “Gard, do you know what you have here? A revelation.” This response peeked Gard’s interest, and he began to read it. He made contact with Urantia Foundation after which he joined a weekly study group in Berkeley.

Gard says that “reading The Urantia Book for the first time was the beginning of a pilgrimage of discovery, the beginning of the realization that God has a will for each of our lives. The pilgrimage is the greatest adventure that one can pursue.”

After twenty-five years in the business world as a Certified Public Accountant and Financial Planner, he returned to college to obtain a Ph.D. in Comparative Religion at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. He recently published his first book and has been teaching philosophy at the University of Nevada for the last ten years.

Michael MacIsaac

Michael (Mike) MacIsaac is a second-generation reader who began participating in study groups in his mid-teens. He is married to Anna, a Swedish reader, and having spent his adult life in Sweden, he has done much to develop Urantia Book readership there. Mike brings a broad range of experiences and international perspective to the Advisory Board. He is also currently involved with the Urantia Historical Society, the Urantia Foundation's translations committee, and serves as the UAI Dissemination Chair.

In 2000, he strategically placed about 100 books in youth hostels and the library systems of 12 Europeans countries. In 2002, as part of an extensive North America and Europe ‘UByouth Tour’, he placed books in libraries and hostels in the Baltic States. In 2006, he and several others embarked on strategic placement and dissemination effort in Ukraine, Hungary and Romania. In connection with UBYouth activities, Mike helped organize Urantia camps at Rainbow Gatherings: Idaho in 2001, Utah in 2003, Colorado in 2006, and New Mexico in 2009.

For nearly 10 years Mike biannually worked a Urantia booth at the new age expos in the Stockholm area, often managing the entire enterprise solo. He would trade set up and clean up labor with organizers in order to get space for free. He arranged opportunities to do ‘booth work’ at similar expos in Norway and other cities in Sweden and also worked booths at new age expos in Helsinki, Finland, the 1999 Parliament of World Religions in Cape Town, South Africa, a 2000 Whole Life Expo in Denver Colorado and the 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany.

Edward Southwick

Meredith Tenney

Meredith Tenney is a visionary program developer and interfaith minister with degrees in law, public health, and nurse-midwifery. She co-founded the East Coast Women‘s Corps. and was the Creator/Director of Adolescent Preventive Services, an innovative program for at-risk youth. She co-founded InnerLife International, Inc. in 2005 and spearheaded a women’s Sewing Machine Project in Kenya in 2006. Meredith offered a presentation called "The Garden Project" at the IC08 Conference. Her development of The Garden Project more recently led to co-anchoring the Garden Conference in Valle Crucis, NC.

Meredith has been a contributing author to a book, Spiritual Awakening and been a guest panelist at the World Brotherhood Union Symposium in Istanbul. She works internationally to energize the connection between feminine spirituality and women’s global leadership and to create transformational change.

James Woodward

James Woodward discovered The Urantia Book in 1973 and read solo for twenty years before becoming involved with the UB community. Currently, James is also Study Group Chair of UAI and Vice-President of Greater Lake Michigan Urantia Association. In past years, he served as the UAUS’s Publications Chair and Education Chair. Beginning in 2000, James worked for five years as Urantia Foundation’s manager of the Reader Services Department, handling the inquiries and needs of both seasoned and newly interested readers. More recently, he served as editor and marketing consultant for the recently published secondary work, Heaven Is Not The Last Stop. James has developed presentations for churches, expos, conferences and bookstores.

UBtheNEWS is excited to start working with James in his capacity as the UAI Study Group Chair. Before the conference we expect to create and launch a number of new strategies for helping study groups appreciate why and how UBtheNEWS-style presentations, the website, and the pamphlets are effective at inspiring people to attend an introduction and learn about the UB. Study group introductions are especially powerful because they provide “immediate follow up.” They combine introductions and interactions with the UB community. James looks forward to sharing the results of these new initiatives for study group vitality at the conference.

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