The Urantia Diaries of Harold and Martha Sherman: Volume Six: 1955-1998

This last volume of The Urantia Diaries of Harold and Martha Sherman spans four decades; it begins with the Shermans’ receiving the just-published The Urantia Book in October 1955 and ends with Martha’s death in 1998, Harold predeceasing her in 1987.This volume follows not only the parallel tracks of the slowly growing Urantia readership and the later stages of Harold’s career, but also the intersections—the Shermans’ witting and unwitting encounters with Urantia Book readers and those otherwise connected with the book.In his lectures and classes Harold occasionally mentioned the Urantia Book and his association with it, which brought inquiries from those interested in learning more. He had periodically considered writing about his Urantia experiences ever since Harry Loose instructed him and Martha to keep a diary to be used in an eventual book about Urantia which would be a companion to the Urantia Book itself. But it wasn’t until he was reaching the end of his career that he decided to write a book about his lifelong search for truth and include a chapter on Urantia. That chapter, called “Pipeline to God,” was included in How to Know What to Believe, published as a Fawcett paperback in 1976.How to Know What to Believe was one of Harold’s less successful books and went out of print a few years after publication. (We have included the entire “Pipeline to God” chapter in this volume.) But the book attracted the attention of American author Martin Gardner, who contacted Martha Sherman in 1992. Martha granted him access to the Sherman diaries (which Harold had barely used while writing “Pipeline to God”) and much of Harold’s correspondence. In his 1995 book, Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery—the first popular book about Urantia ever published—Gardner mentioned that the Sherman diaries, housed with other Sherman materials at the University of Central Arkansas, would be made available to the public in January 2000. It was this notice that led to our publication of The Urantia Diaries of Harold and Martha Sherman.