Blog du projet

As longtime readers will know, we've been adding chapter by chapter explanations for the four gospels, written by Ray and Star Silverman, for the past few years. They finished John's Gospel back in June 2024, and started to compile the explanations into book form. As they did that, they realized that their Matthew explanations needed to be improved. That's a useful lesson in itself: as we read and study the Word, we can hope to gain more insight into its deep wisdom. So... Team Silverman went back at it, and they've just supplied improved versions of their explanations of the first 15 chapters of Matthew's Gospel. You can start reading them here: Exploring the Meaning of Matthew 1.

We're pleased to post another brand new translation of "Heaven and Hell" - this time in Hindi. There are 615 million Hindi speakers in the world. It's a pretty safe bet that a lot of them, at some point in their lives, are going to speculate about whether there's life after death, and if so, what it's like. And... now they can read स्वर्ग और नरक and find out!

There are around 5000 Hebrew and Greek Bible words whose symbolic meanings are pretty well understood. For years, we've been carefully trying to spread the known examples across other occurrences of these words, and from English into languages that we don't know as well. There are lots of nuances involved, but we're gradually getting closer to full coverage. In the Bible text, we highlight the words we're reasonably confident about, and offer popup explanations. We've recently found that, with care, we can use AI to do a good job of finding known concepts in verses in most of the languages that we support. In the past several weeks, we've been able to add more than 16000 new terms - for Bible people, places, and tribes - in 24 languages. Next up: rippling all the other simple concepts.

Here's a brand new translation of "Divine Providence" in Hindi! It's been translated by Rev. Peter Devassy, and sponsored by Swedenborg Publishers International, a project of the Swedenborg Scientific Association.

There is a new version of the Swedenborg Reader app out for Android and iOS devices. It helps you read and search Swedenborg's theological works, with or without a mobile or internet connection. This new version includes search enhancements, upgraded read-aloud functions, and improved logic for handling reference links when there are several options.

Well, there is! And now there is a new version of the Swedenborg Reader app ready for your Windows computer. It's built from the same code base as our app for Android and iOS devices, with some compile-time tweaks. It's perfect for when you want to read and search Swedenborg's theological works from your laptop or desktop, but you have a slow or non-existent internet connection. Here's a link to the store and the free app.

We have two English translations of "Apocalypse Explained" - one by John Whitehead, and one by Isaiah Tansley. They are substantial works, with more than 14,000 scripture references. In print they fill 5 fat volumes. We've had them on the site for a long time, but they'd been scanned and marked up, and... they were messy. Now, thanks to steady slogging by some careful editors, we've gone all the way through them both, making many hundreds of corrections, and they're in pretty good shape! These "Apocalypse Explained" (or AE for short) translations are particularly useful to Bible readers because the work offers a very broad exegesis of Bible passages. Of the 14,514 Bible references, only around 2700 are to the Book of Revelation. The others draw from all the other books of the Word.

How about lots of "heavenly secrets" -- insights into the inner meaning of the Bible? We've just posted the first half of "Nebeske Tajne", a brand new Croatian translation (by Novi Jerusalem) of Swedenborg's "Arcana Coelestia", or "Secrets of Heaven", which was written between 1749 and 1757. Here's a link to Nebeske Tajne.

Here's another Spanish translation that we just received: "La Divina Providencia", courtesy of friends and colleagues from Brazil, Peru, and the USA. It's linked up and ready to be read: La Divina Providencia.

The New Century Edition team at the Swedenborg Foundation has just released Volume 8 (of 15) of its "Secrets of Heaven" translation of Arcana Coelestia. We have it all linked-up and imported here, starting at #5191: Secrets of Heaven volume 8

We just deployed a third Macedonian translation of one of Swedenborg's works: "Доктрина на животот за Новиот Ерусалем", or, in English, "Doctrine about Life for the New Jerusalem". Here's a link!

Today, we posted another brand new translation of "Doctrine about Faith". This one is in Montenegrin, and it's been produced by the energetic Novi Jerusalem mission there. Here's a link to it!

We just deployed a second translation of one of Swedenborg's works in Macedonian -- this time of his important short work, "Doctrine about Faith". Here's a link! There are more to come, in Macedonian, and in other languages of the Balkans.

We've had so many sub-projects on the go that it's sort of dizzying. There's a lot of useful news: a new version of our Reader App, a new version of the AI-driven New Christian Chatbot, more new translations of the Writings, finishing the main cleaning and editing of the Potts Concordance text, adding the final chapters of Ray and Star Silverman's explanations of the inner meaning of the Four Gospels, and new test results from human-in-the-loop machine translation -- all sorts of things. We've started to summarize the states of these projects on a projects page here!

18 editors have slogged through the whole of the Swedenborg Concordance, with its more than a quarter of a million references, fixing hundreds of thousands of scan/OCR errors. It's been a labor of many hundreds of hours, and despite some moments of despair, we finished the main edits to the last slice of it today! Huge thanks to our wonderful editors! Fran, Dale, Rebecca, Karen, Brad, Reinhold, Clark, Bill, Calvin, Bengt, Tom, Cathy, Reyana, Judy, Ian, Maynard, Byron, Lawson, the Kempton High School class, and... am I forgetting anyone?? Probably! It's been a big long-running project. What a team! One little vignette: I was apologizing to one guy who had just finished editing one of the longest slices, and he said, 'Don't be sorry; this was the perfect file for me! There was so much in there that I needed to know.' Read more about it here! And, if you would like to see an example of the cleaned text, here's one slice. Next, we'll do some mapping of old numbering to new, and then parse the text into our database, and then do lots of things with it that will be really useful for everyone!

Rev. Hyunjin Yang has started to translate "Arcana Coelestia", or "Secrets of Heaven", which explains the inner meaning of Genesis and Exodus. It's a great big work, and this is just a start -- but it's a good start! There are 249 paragraphs, explaining the first 2 and a half chapters of Genesis. Here's a link to it: 천국의 비밀.

We finished importing and hyperlinking Mr. Nagao's translation of Divine Providence, or "神の摂理についての天使的知恵の書".

Ray and Star Silverman have just finished their very fine and much-visited commentary on the gospels: "The Four Gospels: A Seamless Garment". We just posted the final chapter which explores the meaning of John 21. It's been a labor of love, and of many years, for them... and it's been an honor and pleasure for the New Christian Bible Study project to be the online publisher of the whole series. It's been an important part of our spiritual journey, too! A printed book is planned, so there will be more news to come.

We're excited to bring our readers another world first: An online translation of part of Swedenborg's work on Heaven and Hell, or "Lehodimo le Dihele" in Sesotho. This partial translation includes numbers 421-520, with more on the way soon.

There is a new version of the Swedenborg Reader app now available for Android and iOS devices. It helps you read and search Swedenborg's theological works, with or without a mobile or internet connection. What's the latest?

• New highlighting functionality - select text to highlight, then choose "Highlight" from the context menu to save your selection as a bookmark. Tap the highlighted text again to add a note.
• Improved "sharing" - previously, only an entire passage could be shared via various messaging and social apps, but now you have the option to select a specific sentence or chunk of text to share.
• More supported languages - new user interfaces added for Albanian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian
• Updated homepage - now with direct links to your Bookmarks and the NC Chatbot.

The New Century Edition team at the Swedenborg Foundation has just released Volume 7 (of 15) of its "Secrets of Heaven" translation of Arcana Coelestia. We have it all linked-up and imported here, starting at #4639: Secrets of Heaven volume 7

...you have a treat in store! AI is all the rage, of course, and it IS very cool, and it has a lot of potential for the work we're doing in NCBS. Our New Christian Chatbot uses the underlying knowledge base of ChatGPT, fine-tuned/governed by the texts of the Old and New Testaments and Swedenborg's Writings. It's multilingual, i.e. if you talk to it in French, it will answer you in French. One of the best things about it is that it will suggest a list of the most relevant sources, with links to them. It's not perfect, but it's pretty useful already, and getting better fast. The robot icon is shown on the main toolbar now, and it's right on the home page.

We've had some fairly basic Bible reading plans available for quite a while. We've added more features to them now, so they can include videos, pictures, more explanatory text, and the like. And, way back in 1992, Rev. Eric Carswell put together a book of selected passages from Swedenborg's works, into a "Swedenborg Sampler". He used it to lead small group dialogs, and found that it was pretty helpful for people from all walks of life, coming from various religious backgrounds. We had a copy of this... so we asked Eric if we could use it, and he said "sure", so we parsed it into our Reading Plan format, and it's now ready for action. Check our Reading Plans page to browse the available plans.

Here's an update on the Concordance cleaning project. Sixteen editors are ploughing through this big task. 16 of 58 slices are all done. 6 more are edited and ready to review. 16 more in process right now. Only 19 are still a mess. There's still time to get in on editing if you want to!

Hot off the presses... it's a new version of the Swedenborg Reader app for Android and iOS devices. It helps you read and search Swedenborg's theological works in 22 languages, with or without a mobile or internet connection. What's new in this release?

• Bookmarks: You can now easily create bookmarks to passages that you want to remember.
• Related passages: At the bottom of each page, you can see a list of passages that relate - somehow - to the one you're reading. Right now, these are mostly passages that are known parallels, or ones where whole chunks of text were copied from one work to another, by Swedenborg. We hope, too, to add contrasting ones, in the future.
• Inbound passages: If there are any passages that link to the one you're reading, you'll get a list of those, too.
• We've made some nice updates to navigation, too, and streamlined some search functions.

Hope you like it! You can get it free from Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store.

The Concordance cleaning project is coming along nicely. We finished X, Y, and Z first; they were fairly short, and good for a shakedown cruise. Now, we've finished A, too. B's been edited and is ready for review. All the C through E files are being actively edited. There are 12 volunteer editors up and running, and a few more will be coming on stream soon. There's still plenty of room for more, too! If you would like to help, get in touch.

We have just posted a brand new Swedish translation of "Läran om den heliga skriften" (Doctrine about the Sacred Scripture) from Rev. Göran Appelgren. This work is really important; it shows how the Bible, with its layers of meaning, still rests at the heart of a true understanding of... everything, really... and at the heart of a well-lived life here, and later in heaven. Here's a link to it: "Läran om den heliga skriften".

The popular commentary series by Ray and Star Silverman on the four gospels has three new installments, starting here: John 18.

The Bible is a big book, and it's densely packed with concepts, people, places, and stories. When Swedenborg was explaining the symbolism of these many Bible things, it took him a lot of books to do it. In the later years of the 1800s, there was a New Christian scholar, Rev. John F. Potts, who spent 27 years compiling a 6-volume concordance to Swedenborg's writings. It's been one of the go-to New Church research tools ever since, rather like Strong's Concordance is for the Bible. But... the printed volumes are big and unwieldy, and are only in English, and the great work of the Internet Archive in scanning it still resulted in giant, slow .pdf files. We decided to clean the scanned text. It's taken a long time -- more than a year. We're getting close to getting it to a useful state. We're recruiting volunteer proofreaders and editors now.

In the meantime, we've divvied up the massive .pdf files into 50 smaller ones, so they're a little easier to use for searching. Here's a link to the page where you can find them: Swedenborg Concordance Files.

And, coming soon, you'll be able to search the concordance text itself, and we'll be importing it into our main database so it can be even more useful.

We're pleased to bring you a new set of Chinese translations of some theological texts that Swedenborg wrote but didn't publish. Many are drafts or outlines for works that he subsequently did expand, polish, and publish. They were written in Latin, and these are the first translations of them into Chinese that we're aware of. Here's the list:

• The Inner Meaning of the Prophets and Psalms ( 先知书、诗篇和圣言历史部分的内义概览) - 该书是一本条理清晰的概述/学习指南，介绍了《旧约》中先知书和所有诗篇的内在含义。
• Coronis (真实的基督教附录) - 在这本《圣经》经文集中，瑞典堡提出了这样一个观点：旧的基督教会正在消亡，而一个基于对圣言更充分理解的新教会正在形成。
• Canons of the New Church (新教会圣典) - 在这份简短的草稿中，瑞典堡简要概述了新教会的神学体系--这是 1770 年出版的《真正的基督教宗教》的初步草图。
• Last Judgment (draft) (最后的审判(遗作)) - 这份手稿是已出版作品《关于最后审判的续篇》的草稿。
• About Charity (仁爱的教义) - 慈善的真正含义是什么？瑞典堡在这篇简短的文章中概述了这一主题。
• About Marriage (婚姻) - 这是瑞登堡在准备撰写《婚姻之爱》（英文标题通常为 "Conjugial Love "或 "Marriage Love"）时所做的早期大纲/草稿。
• True Christian Religion (Additions) (真实的基督教补录) - 1770 年出版《真正的基督教宗教》后，瑞典伯格起草了这些关于一些精神体验的描述，作为对主要作品的潜在补充。
• Summaries in the Exposition of the Apocalypse (启示录诠释概述) - 在这项研究中，瑞典堡总结了对《启示录》内在含义的章节级解释。
• The Way to a Knowledge of the Soul (通向灵魂知识的道路) - 这篇简短的论文似乎标志着作者从有关灵魂本质的初步研究到更彻底的方法的转变，这些方法在他的《灵魂领域的动力学》一书中达到了顶峰。
• A Specimen and Sketch of the Doctrine of the New Church (样本和草图) - 这是新基督教教义的简要概述。
• The Consummation of the Age (时代的完结) - 精神史追溯了 "教会"--人们的精神生活和世界观--的兴衰。本纲要草案描述了第一个基督教会的精神衰落和新基督教时代的开始。
• Precepts of the Ten Commandments (十诫) - 瑞典堡以 "十诫 "为基础，写下了这篇文章，作为 "生命学说 "的草稿。

We've just released a new version of the Swedenborg Reader app for Android and iOS devices. The Swedenborg Reader app allows you to read and search the theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg in 22 languages, with or without a mobile or internet connection. What's new in this release?

• We've added tables of contents for each translation to support easy navigation between chapters.
• The app now saves your furthest passage read for each translation so you can quickly continue where you left off.
• When using the read-aloud feature, the app will continue audio playback when you minimize or switch to another app so you can listen while driving or doing other tasks on your device.

Get it from Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store.

We have offered notes and bookmarking functions for a while... but they've been a little clunky. Now, we're making them better. If you're logged in to your free user account, you can make a note about what you're reading or watching by clicking the icon, and add bookmarks to passages that you want to come back to using the icon. You can edit or review these saved items later from the "User Menu" (the little person icon near the search button) - look for "My Bookmarks" and "My Notes". Try them out, and tell us what features you would like us to add.

We have a brand new translation of Heaven and Hell online in Albanian. There are still some links that haven't been made yet, but it's usable, and we decided to go ahead and post it, and clean it up a little further after Christmas. We have stablemates for it in Croatian and Macedonian coming soon. Here's a link to this one: "Parajsa dhe ferri".

We're really excited to be working with a New Christian missionary team in the Balkans. More news on that soon... but in the meantime, here's our first posting of an Albanian translation of one of Swedenborg's works. It's "Doctrine about the Lord", or "Doktrina E Perëndisë". It's an interesting-looking language. We need to add an Albanian Bible translation, too, and do a lot more -- but it's a promising start!

For quite a while, we've had a text-to-speech feature, and it's gradually getting better. But you've always had to listen to a chapter or passage from its beginning. Until now. Now, you can select some text, and click the speaker button, and it will start reading from where you've started your selection. Note, though, that it won't work on an iPad; text selection is handled differently there, so it resists!

The popular commentary series by Ray and Star Silverman on the four gospels has another installment: John 16.

We just released brand new versions of our Swedenborg Reader app for Android and iOS devices. What's new in this release? Hyperlinks to cross-referred passages, and to Bible references -- that's a big step forward. It's now available in 20 languages, too; that's big. We've improved the search functionality. It's easy to share a page with your friends. It's easy to find text on a page. You can jump to reading online on NCBS if you have a web connection. The text-to-speech function is much improved. There's a lot to like! Get it from Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store. It's free. Just search for "Swedenborg Reader". Happy reading!

We just hit a milestone in some Latin work. Why is that at all interesting? Useful? Important? Well... back in the mid-1700s, when Swedenborg was writing out the theological basis for a new Christian religion, he wrote in Latin. Then, as Latin withered, and as more people became literate in their own spoken languages, translators wanted to translate Swedenborg's works into local languages. So they did... and every time, they had to wrestle with the challenges involved in deciding how best to convey the ideas from Latin into, e.g. English, or Italian, or Japanese. There are still a lot of active Swedenborg-translation pipelines around the world. If we can help translators and readers work well with Swedenborg's Latin, then the world's Bible readers have a better chance of finding and understanding these New Christian truths. That's the reasoning.

What's new in this phase? We offer a Latin grammar search tool -- Advanced Latin Search. It helps you find various places where Swedenborg has used a word in any of its family of word forms. It can also show you all the places where Swedenborg uses superlative adjectives, or that kind of thing. We just added a bunch - thousands - of new words (that Swedenborg used) with all their grammatical characteristics. Our search results are going to be more thorough, and more reliable. We also made the searching more granular, so if you want to look for adverbs or conjunctions, you can! This sounds pretty arcane, and it is, but you might be surprised how you can get some sense of the Latin text without really knowing the language. It's kind of fun.

We're very pleased to bring you another Chinese translation of one of Swedenborg's works by Guang Bin Liu, this one being the short work, "Invitation to the New Church", or 《新教会的邀请》.

The New Century Edition team has released Volume 6 of its "Secrets of Heaven" translation. It's an English translation from Swedenborg's Latin work, Arcana Coelestia, from the 1750's. If you want to know what the Books of Genesis and Exodus really mean, this is the place to find out.

We have more John chapter commentaries up online... chapters 13 and 14, start here with John 13. We're machine translating them as we go, and then in some cases, human translators are improving on those ones. Ray and Star say that this is some of the hardest but most rewarding study they've ever done. Have a look; maybe you'll find the same thing.

One of our friends in Australia supplied this nugget: When Jesus talked about the importance of being born again... a better translation of his words might be "being born from above". It adds an interesting new emphasis on the source of our hoped-for, worked-for spiritual rebirth. Here's a link to the article: "Born again?"

We have two English translations of "Apocalypse Explained" - one by John Whitehead, and one by Isaiah Tansley. They are substantial works, with thousands of scripture references. In print they're in 5 volumes. We've had them on the site for a long time, with most of the linking done - but in need of proofing and correcting. Now, we're doing that! We're not done, but we've made a lot of headway, so we just imported new versions of them both. They're cleaner than ever, and more accessible.

This translation, 新教会的教会历史, is of a very brief outline of an argument that Swedenborg wrote out -- beginning to make the case for the need for the New Christian church, and jotting down a few instances where some people were receiving these new ideas gladly, while others were rejecting them. We also have it available in English, Spanish, Dutch, and, of course, Latin.

We just processed and imported Chinese translations of four more of Swedenborg's theological works:

• Divine Love, 神性之爱
• Divine Wisdom, 神性智慧
• The Word, 关于圣经或圣言
• Miracles and Signs, 神迹奇事

These are all works that Swedenborg left in manuscript, and the first three were drafts for later works that he published, and which are already on the site. But they're interesting!

We have more John chapter commentaries up online... chapters 10, 11, and 12 are all new, starting here, by Ray and Star Silverman. We're machine translating them as we go, and then in some cases, human translators are improving on those ones. Please bear in mind that John's Gospel is really deep, and takes some serious study in any language. Ray and Star have a nice clear way of writing, but still, the machines - however good - are probably not doing it justice. Yet.

We're working with an experienced virtual team, spanning the Americas, to bring you a Spanish translation of Arcana Coelestia, i.e. Arcanos Celestiales. We have the first 691 sections up and linked, covering the first 6 chapters of Genesis.

There's lots more translating going on apace: Here are chapter commentaries by Ray and Star Silverman, translated into Chinese, already halfway through Mark's Gospel. Here's a link to Chapter 1.

We just had a Bulgarian "sprint", working with some new Bulgarian-speaking friends, in which we added a Bulgarian Bible translation, a Bulgarian UI, and 4 Bulgarian translations of Swedenborg's theological works, all within a few days. It's a great start in this language, and it grows our world community a little bit more! Here's a link to sample Bulgarian page.

When you have a BIG set of theological works to approach, it's nice to have some help. So, we're please to introduce a New Christian Chatbot. It's based on ChatGPT 3.5, and it's trained to focus on the Bible and on Swedenborg's theological works. It's not perfect, but it's pretty helpful most of the time, and it's getting better quickly. You can find it on the Tools menu on our Here's a link to our home page.

Here are three more chapter commentaries by Ray and Star Silverman, translated into Chinese, to wrap up the Gospel of Matthew. Here's a link to 26.

We've been working closely with the Heavenly Doctrines Publishing Foundation to process some of the indexes that Swedenborg made. We've made a lot of headway! Swedenborg made nine indexes to his theological works -- sometimes a draft and then a fair copy. There were two versions each for Arcana Coelestia, Apocalypse Revealed, and a lost treatise on marriage that was a precursor to Conjugial Love. Those 6 indexes have all been imported and linked up, in their original Latin and in new or refreshed English translations, and in 4 cases, Portuguese, too. You can see them on our Theology hub page, under the Theological Drafts, Indexes, Diaries section. These will be useful for writers and scholars, and we can see ways that they will help us build out our glossary and thesaurus functions.

If you're reading in the Old or New Testament and you want to add another independent column that shows a different work or number, now you can. You click a little blue icon and you get a new column! Or two.

From the Word or from Swedenborg's works, you can select a word or phrase, and click the blue rocket icon , and we run an instant search for other occurrences of your selected text.

What's more; if you happen to be referring to Swedenborg's Latin texts (some light reading!), you can highlight some text, click the blue graduate icon , and get meanings in English, and the grammatical characteristics for all the words you've selected. (Ctrl+s also works for this.)

If you've been following along at home, you know that we're very "into" making Swedenborg's Latin works accessible to the scholars that are interested in them. There's a bunch of good news on that front. We've improved the Neo-Latin grammar search page. The search pane is more concise. Navigating through results is faster. Highlighting is better. And now, you can get instant definitions from Whitaker's words, plus details of grammar and any ambiguities. What's more; in the Latin texts themselves, you can highlight some text, click a button, and get meanings and grammatical characteristics for all the words you've selected.

If you're awake to the internal sense of the Word, we hope you've been enjoying the commentaries by Ray and Star Silverman that we've been adding. Translations of these chapter summaries into Chinese have been popular, too -- and we just uploaded two more for Matthew 24 and 2. They're being translated by Chinese-speaking friends of the project, and we're delighted to be able to bring them to you. Here's a link to 25.

Swedenborg sometimes repeated whole sections verbatim from his prior works. Other times, he re-wrote things -- so the sections are "parallel" but not exact repeats. We found, in one of the appendices to Potts' Concordance, a list of more than 1100 of these repeated passages. So, in a "this won't take that long" moment of optimism, we re-keyed them, massaged the data, looked up obscure things, and eventually imported the data to our "related passages" table.

We're working hard on the next version of the Swedenborg Reader smartphone app. One of the big new features will be in-line links to other passages. It's looking pretty promising; stay tuned for a release forecast.

We've offer research tools in depth, but they've not been close enough to your fingertips. That's changing. For example, on the Advanced Search page, you can now jump straight to some of the most commonly used tools, like Searle's Index and Bogg's Glossary.

When you use the Advanced Search function now, you'll find that it's easier than ever to navigate down through results, and see things highlighted in a more intuitive way.

Back in 1970, the General Conference of the New Church (UK) published "The Pentateuch", a translation of the first 5 books of the Bible. It was aimed at trying to preserve the inner spiritual sense of the Word, while still making a reasonably accessible translation. We're pleased to be able to bring it to you, as of today!

Just like your breakfast cereal and laundry detergent -- our Korean machine translations are new and improved! We use DeepL for machine translation as our preferred service, so when they added Korean, we tested it right away. Our Korean speaking readers liked it much better, so we re-translated all our earlier machine translations.

We've been bringing you a whole series of commentaries on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, by Ray and Star Silverman. They say that these last few chapters of John have been the toughest ones yet - first to understand, and then to try to explain. Have a look! (They've been machine translated, too, into many of our supported languages - though with deep religious concepts, some tolerance of machine-confusion is probably needed.)

We just processed 9 brand new Chinese translations of some of Swedenborg's unpublished theological works. If you look on our Theology page, and choose Chinese in the language selector, you'll see them listed in the "Theological Drafts, Indexes, Diaries..." section of the page.

The Bible is written with deep spiritual meaning. In Matthew 5:18, Jesus emphasizes the importance even of "every jot and tittle" - small marks in the Hebrew alphabet that modify other letters. The literal words are important in the Hebrew and the Greek, and most translators take pains to find words in their languages that match closely. Swedenborg described the spiritual meanings of more than 5000 Bible words and phrases in his many theological works. We just successfully parsed and database-ified the entries from "A Dictionary of Bible Imagery", compiled by Alice Spiers Sechrist, published by the Swedenborg Foundation in 1973, and we've added some 2000+ new entries to our previous list, and expanded and corrected many others. These new ones are only in English now, but we will work on translating them, and highlighting the matching words in the various languages of the Word.

Happy New Year! Thanks to the superb work of our friends at the Swedenborg Foundation, we have added new translations of Survey (Brief Exposition) and Soul-Body Interaction to New Christian Bible Study. This is the first English translation of Brief Exposition in nearly 70 years!

When we look around the world, there's much to lament -- but also very much to be grateful for. There are many billions of kindnesses done every day. There is a lot of love in the world. A little over 2000 years ago, Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem. It was a miraculous event. We still celebrate it, and are moved by its holiness and power. And because of it, the door is open to us.

We've added summaries of John chapters 6 and 7 from Ray and Star Silverman. For chapter 7, Ray said, "This one took a long time - over two months - not just because school was starting, but because it went through multiple revisions before we were finally satisfied with the outcome. The teaching, 'The Holy Spirit was not yet because Jesus was not yet glorified,' is in this chapter. It's a stunning statement with all kinds of significant implications. We merely touched on those implications in this chapter, but will be returning to that idea again (as the Spirit leads) as we continue the chapter explanations."

Start here: Exploring the Meaning of John 6 and Exploring the Meaning of John 7.

We have posted a new translation of Divine Providence in German that was originally translated by Dr. J.F.I. Tafel in the mid-1800s, and revised by Dr. Friedemann Horn, and edited by Franz and Maria Kreuzwegerer. We would like to say "danke" to our friends at Swedenborg Verlag for the permission to use this translation.

Here's a link to start reading: Die göttliche Vorsehung

Thanks to the hard work of our friends at HDPF, we have updated our translation of Apocalypse Revealed in Spanish! Take a look at "Apocalipsis Revelado".

We have uploaded a new translation of Heaven and Hell in Chinese by Ruian/瑞安. This is now the third Chinese translation of Swedenborg's most famous work available on New Christian Bible Study. Take a look at it here.

The hard-working team of Dutch translators has just reached a major milestone: They have finished translating - from Latin! - every single one of Swedenborg's published theological works. Heartfelt congratulations to them!! We are so blessed to have their permission to use these translations on this site. There are 23-25 million native Dutch speakers in the world, and another 5 million who speak it as a second language, so this is important. Here's a link to the translation of "Arcana Coelestia," or "Secrets of Heaven," or "De Hemelse Verborgenheden" in Dutch.

Here, too, is a link to the site of Swedenborg Boekhuis, in the Netherlands: www.swedenborg.nl

The pipeline for translated volumes of Secrets of Heaven, (The New Century Edition) has brought us all another volume, "Volume 4", in the printed portable edition. It's an exegesis of the inner meaning of Genesis chapters 22-26. Our friends at the Swedenborg Foundation have supplied the text to us, too, so that we can get it all linked up to the corresponding Bible text, and to Swedenborg's other theological works. The newly added text begins here.

We've been offering a Tagalog Bible for a while, and it's very popular. But, until yesterday, we didn't have any of Swedenborg's theological works translated to match up with it. And, now we do! Here's "Doctrine of Life" in Filipino - Buhay. Many thanks to Elpido Enriquez and Septhan Baltazar for translating it.

Here's a third Hindi translation of one of Swedenborg's works, "Doctrine about the Lord" (प्रभु), translated by Peter Devassy. This is a good book for anyone who's interested in what the Bible says about the nature of the Lord God Jesus Christ.

We've just added a Hindi Holy Bible translation, too, here: Hindi Bible.

Here's a second translation of one of Swedenborg’s works, "Doctrine for Life", (जिंदगी), translated into Hindi by Peter Devassy.

We imported our first ever Hindi translation with "An Invitation to the New Church" (नए कलीसीय के लिए आमंत्रण), from Peter Devassy. We also created a Hindi language translation of the whole website interface.

We added summaries of John chapters 1-5 from Ray and Star Silverman. Start here: Exploring the Meaning of John 1.

We uploaded and formatted 2 new translations in Chinese from Guang Bin.

• "Doctrine of Life" - 教义之生命篇
• "De Verbo" - 圣经的字义与灵义

• "The Last Judgement (Continuation)" in Chinese - 最后的审判(续)
• "True Christian Religion" in Japanese - 真（ほんとう）のキリスト教
• "The Last Judgement (Continuation)" in Malayalam - അന്ത്യനായവിധി (തുടർച്ച)

We added 309 new Bible story explanations that we pulled in from William Worcester's Sower Notes. Head over to our Bible stories page and set the author filter to: William L. Worcester.

Here's what's new this week:

• "Charity" in Spanish - Doctrina de la Caridad
• "Interaction of the Soul and Body" in Malayalam - ആത്മാവിന്റെയും ശരീരത്തിന്റെയും പരസ്പരവ്യവഹാരം
• "Apocalypse Revealed" in Serbian - Apokalipsa Otkrivena

When you're reading the Bible, it starts to become clear that some of the words must have deeper meaning. Why 12 apostles, 12 gates to the city New Jerusalem, and 12 tribes of the Children of Israel? Why bread, wine, oil, and water, mentioned again and again? These words correspond to spiritual things. We've just updated our "word meanings" hub page, so it's easier to find things, and browse, and learn what you would like to know. Here's a link to the new hub!

Here's another nice result from our cooperative work with HDPF: A modern translation of "Apocalipse Revelado". If you're one of the world's 200+ million Portuguese speakers, here's your chance to learn about the deep symbolism in the Bible. Here's a link.

Rev. Peter Devassy has finished yet another translation of one of Swedenborg's works, "The White Horse". It's a brief-ish description of how the symbolism in the Bible works. Here's a link.

HDPF has collaborated with us on a new Spanish translation, "La interacción del alma y el cuerpo". Here's a link.

One of the cool things about working in 2022 is that the machine translation tools have gotten so good. Not perfect, but... really helpful. The same goes for scan/OCR tools. A couple of years ago, we scanned a old-but-good printed translation of "Apocalipse Revelado" in Portuguese, corrected it, and got it online. The Portuguese-speaking team in Brazil has just updated the first half of it, so we just re-made the links and deployed it. Here's a link to it. So, that was good.

AND then, the Spanish-speaking team wanted a jump-start machine translation of it that they could use. So... a couple of hours later, with hard work by computers, we had the Portuguese-to-Spanish translation ready for them to edit. While they're editing it, here's the machine translated version as a useful placeholder.

The Chinese-speaking team has turned out yet another translation of one of Swedenborg's works - this time of "Worlds in Space". They've almost finished translating all of Swedenborg's published works. That's impressive! Here's a link.

We just got a chance to work on Rev. Peter Devassy's recent translation of "Divine Love and Wisdom". It's all set to go now, and here's a link to it!

People have been asking when the next volume of the New Century Edition translation of "Arcana Coelestia" will be available. And, now it is! We got the text from the NCE team at the Swedenborg Foundation earlier this week, and we finished processing it late yesterday. It's good to go. The new sections start at #1886. Here is a link to it.

What are you going to do today? What are you going to build your life around? Well, if you want to see what God suggests... there are more than 300 Bible passages cited in this "user guide" to life, written by Swedenborg in 1763. Thanks to a super-productive team of Chinese-speakers, it's now available in Chinese. First. Time. Ever! Here is a link to it.

Izimfihlakalo Zezulu. This is a Zulu translation of "Arcana Coelestia", Swedenborg's insightful exegesis of Genesis and Exodus, from the 1750's. A New Christian team in South Africa has been working on this translation, and they've now finished volume 9 (of 12). It's pretty exciting! Here is a link to it.

Eventually, each of us decides whether or not to have faith in God. It's a vital decision. This book, written by Swedenborg in Latin back in 1763, brings together more than 50 Bible teachings about faith. In a way, it's a handbook for understanding the role that faith should play in our lives. Swedenborg believed that the Lutheran idea of faith alone was wrong - arguing instead that faith and charity (love towards the neighbor) have to be conjoined in us. And now, here is this handbook in Chinese, a mere 259 years later. Here is a link to it.

What does the Bible tell us about itself? It's been regarded as sacred by very many people for a very long time. In this book, Swedenborg explores this subject, and makes the case that the Bible's inner meaning is what makes it holy. And now, it's available in Chinese for the first time! Here is a link to it.

This is the last item in our current barrel of Swedenborg's scientific writings! In this 3-volume work from 1744-45, Swedenborg continued his detailed study of the human body as the domain of the human soul. Part 1 deals with the organs of the digestive tract, and the abdomen. Part 2 deals with the organs of the thorax. Part 3 treats of the skin, and the senses of touch and taste, and organic forms in general. One suggested translation for the title has been "Dynamics of the Soul's Domain". Here's a link to Wilkinson's English translation from the Latin.

If you've been browsing this news, you'll have seen that we're working our way back through some of Swedenborg's scientific works, cleaning them up and making them more accessible. This work, "First Principles of Natural Things", dates from 1734. We haven't followed our normal custom and tried to bring in the complete text; there are too many diagrams and equations to make this very practicable, but we've linked to some .pdf files. It's a three-volume work, first on basic principles of nature, and then iron, copper, and brass metallurgy. This work was translated into English by Rev. Augustus Clissold in 1845-1846. Here's a link to the page where you can find out more about it.

This work is another major scientific work of Swedenborg's that encompasses anatomy, philosophy and theology. The traditional English title is misleading, since the Latin "de anima humana" means the human soul. Here, Swedenborg is considering where and how the human soul has its "seat" in the human body, and how it operates (its economy). He considers first the heart and the circulatory system, and then the brain and the nervous system. An alternative translation for the title could be "Dynamics of the Soul's Domain". Here's a link to Clissold's English translation from the Latin.

We've just processed and imported one of Swedenborg's later scientific works, "Pyschologia rationalis". He was well into his theological explorations, too, at this point in his career, looking for the seat of the human soul in the body. It's interesting to see what the state of the art was in Psychology at the time, and you get a sense of Swedenborg's growing conviction of the connections between the brain (and body), the soul, and spiritual realities. Here's a link (for logged-in users).

Here's the latest installment of Heger's Czech translation of Arcana Coelestia, where Swedenborg describes the inner meaning of the story of "Noah and the Ark". It's an ancient sacred story, packed with spiritual meaning. And, here it is in Czech!

What does the Bible tell us about the nature of the Lord? People have been thinking about this, and trying to understand it, for a very long time. In this short(ish) work, you'll find the New Christian teachings about it. And now, we've just added a 14th language - Chinese - to our collection of translations. Here is a link to it.

We're starting to add Bible book summaries, so that people who are relatively new to the Bible can get a better bird's-eye view of it, and how it works. When you click on the Bible link, choose a translation, and then a book, you get a popup window with a choice of chapter numbers. Below the chapter buttons, there's now a "Book Summary" button (for the first 8 books so far -- more coming)!

Here's commentary on the last two chapters of Luke's Gospel, from Ray and Star Silverman. This is really important truth for all of us. Here are the links to Luke 23 and Luke 24.

Here's the very latest commentary from Ray and Star Silverman for Luke 22. This is perfect timing, as we come up to Palm Sunday and then Easter.

We just posted the last piece of 属天的奥秘, or Secrets of Heaven, in Chinese. That means that more than a billion new people can now get deep insights into the inner meaning of the books of Genesis and Exodus, and by extension, the whole of the Word. It's a monumental achievement to make a new translation of this work; it takes 12 thick volumes in English. It's great work by the Chinese-speaking translation team. Here's a link to it on our site, all ready for action.

One of our longstanding drives is to have good modern commentary for every chapter in the Word. That way, readers can read the literal text, and then have access to some thoughtful considerations about its deeper layers of meaning. This is a really important task, and we are deeply grateful to Rev. Julian Duckworth for his careful, inspiring, thought-provoking explanations of the Psalms. All 150 of them. Here's the last one, finished today!

If those two words in close proximity don't strike fear into your heart, then... maybe you took Spanish in high school instead. Seriously... Swedenborg (like all the scholarly people in his day) wrote his theological works in Latin. They've been translated into many languages. Each translator has to wrestle with the best way to express Swedenborg's words and meaning. It helps if they can see the various places where Swedenborg uses a particular word or phrase. Many moons ago (what's 32 times 13?) some very smart New Christian Latinists and programmers got together and made a Latin grammar searching application called NeoSearch. Remember Hypercard? It started out as a Hypercard stack. Then it was built as a Mac application. After a couple of versions, it languished for a while. Then, in 2016, it was wrapped with a web front-end. Now, we've rebuilt it pretty thoroughly, and integrated it with the main body of Latin texts. It will be easier to maintain and extend, and it's sort of friendly-looking, so... maybe it will help with the Latin renaissance. Here's a link to it.

Once upon a time, Emanuel Swedenborg sat down and wrote a 6-volume explanation of the Book of Revelation. He wrote in Latin, with a quill pen. Probably a lot of quill pens. The work was entitled "Apocalypsis Explicata".

Swedenborg was a great student of the Bible. He had recently published an even larger work, "Arcana Coelestia", in which he described the inner spiritual meanings of the Books of Genesis and Exodus. As Swedenborg was nearing the end of this new work, getting ready to explain Revelation chapter 20, he stopped. He left the work in manuscript. Later, he came back to this topic, and wrote and published a 2-volume work, "Apocalypsis Revelata". Years later, the manuscript of AE was typeset and published posthumously. We've had a version of this Latin text online for quite a while, but we hadn't yet linked up the references. Now we have. There are more than 14,000 Bible references! Here's a link to it.

We just finished processing 7 more volumes of "Arcana Coelestia", or "天界の秘義" in Japanese. Many thanks to our good friends in the New Church of Japan and at Arcana Press for the permission to use this translation, and for their help in getting us up the learning curve in Japanese!

Here's a new-to-us Serbian translation of Swedenborg's work on the "Last Judgment", or Poslednji Sud. It was done by Risto Rundo in 2009.

We found a new public domain Ukrainian Bible (УКРАЇНСЬКА БІБЛІЯ) translation, and just processed and deployed it.

We just posted Serbian translations of two more of Swedenborg's works, "Doctrine about the Lord", or "Kratki Prikaz Učenja Nove Crkve", and "A Brief Explanation of the Doctrine of the New Church", or "Nauk Novoga Jerusalima o Gospodu".

Here's a new chapter summary for Genesis 48, from Helen Kennedy. If you haven't read her commentaries on Chapters 45, 46, and 47... well, go read them!

This is fun: We've got a new stream of commentary on the Book of Revelation coming from new author Bradley Sheahan. Here's a link to the first chapter summary.

Here's the very latest commentary from Ray and Star Silverman for Luke 19.

We're really pleased to bring you a Ukrainian translation of one of Swedenborg's theological works: "Новий Єрусалим і його небесне вчення", i.e. The New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine, courtesy of our friends at The Lord's New Church. Here's a link to the new translation.

One more nice addition to our online Russian library: We just posted "Пророки и Псалмы Внутренний смысл". It's a somewhat unique work of Swedenborg's, in which he gives a very brief explanation of the inner meaning of each chapter of each book of the Old Testament prophets, plus one for each Psalm, and even for the beginning of Genesis. Here's a link to it.

We have small team working to update, link, and upload a nicely presented set of Russian translations of Swedenborg's works. We've made a LOT of progress in the past month, and here's the latest... we just posted:

• Апокалипсис открытый, (Apocalypse Revealed). There's more linking to do, but it's up there!
• О Небесах, о мире духов и об аде, (Heaven and Hell).
• Тайны Небесные (Arcana Coelestia). This is for about a third of the total work, including explanations of Genesis chapters 1-17, and Exodus 1-15.

We've just deployed a new "classes and study groups hub" page. It's going to be a clearinghouse for all kinds of opportunities to study New Christian thought, ranging from small informal groups for reading and discussion, all the way up to formal college and graduate classes. We've seeded it with a few course offerings in several languages, and - as group leaders, teachers, and authors post their course offerings - it will grow! It's database-driven, and crowd-sourced, and we're hoping it will become a pretty comprehensive, searchable, useful hub. Hope you like it!

We just added three new Korean titles to our big collection of Swedenborg's works. These have been translated by Seokje Oh. They are:

• 혼과 육체의 상호작용 (Soul-Body Interaction)
• 백마론 (The White Horse)
• 백마론에 덧붙이는 글 (The White Horse - Addendum)

There's a lot to read in Korean, now.

It's been a busy week! We just posted new commentary from Ray and Star Silverman for Luke 18. These chapters have a wisdom-density that's through the roof.

We cleaned up three more Russian translations of Swedenborg's works:

• Мудрость Ангельская О Божественном Провидении, (Divine Providence),
• О Сообщении Души И Тела, (Soul/Body Interaction)
• Учение Нового Иерусалима Относительно Священного Писания (Doctrine about the Sacred Scripture).

We're taking a page from the TJ Watt / Reggie White / Michael Strahan book, and heading straight into polishing up the Russian translations of Swedenborg's works that we have on the site. They've been online for a while, but they've needed some attention. Now, they've finally hit the top of our worklist! Here are the titles have been polished up so far:

• Учение о Господе (Doctrine about the Lord)
• Учение Нового Иерусалима о Вере (Doctrine about Faith)
• Учение Жизни для Нового Иерусалима (Doctrine about Life)

Lots more coming, too!

Here's the latest commentary from Ray and Star Silverman for Luke chapters 15, 16, and 17.

We're just deploying a new "audio hub" page. It's a work in progress. So far, we've gathered data on more than 350 audio resources from various New Christian producers, and brought it together in one place – a searchable clearinghouse. There are talks, podcasts, audio books, and some music. In most cases, we're not hosting the audio -- just giving you links to the places where it lives. Most resources are in English, but we've got some in Chinese, Serbian, and Russian, and will be adding more languages. If you know of New Christian audio resources that we might not know about, send us a note! We'd like to make this a pretty comprehensive, searchable hub. Hope you like it!

We just finished overhauling a French translation of "Apocalypse Revealed", or "L’Apocalypse Révélée". The Latin original, by Emanuel Swedenborg, was published in 1766. Le Boys des Guays translated it into French in the mid 1800s. It was scanned and OCR'd, but rife with scan errors, so... it's been a long process to get it cleaned up, and cross-linked to its many Bible references. But, now, here it is! Many thanks to everyone who helped with this effort; it should be useful for a long time to come.

Some of our friends in Brazil and in the United States have just finished a new translation of "Apocalypse Revealed", or "Apocalipse Revelado", in Portuguese. It was written by Emanuel Swedenborg, in 1766, in Latin. Chapter by chapter, the inner meaning of the Book of Revelation is explored. Here's a link.

Mary and Joseph take the baby Jesus to the temple, according to Jewish custom... and they meet Simeon and Anna, both wise and faithful, who recognize the coming of the Messiah. Here's the story.

Here's brand new commentary from Ray Silverman for Luke chapter 13 and chapter 14.

We have posted brand new commentary from Rev. Julian Duckworth for Psalms 121-125.

Best wishes for Christmas, to all! It's a wonderful holy day. Here are links to the Christmas story, in the Gospel of Matthew and in the Gospel of Luke, chapters 1 and 2.

We've just posted the first "volume" of Arcana Coelestia, translated into Japanese. It includes explanations of the inner meaning of the first 9 chapters of Genesis. Swedenborg published this work, in Latin, in the 1700's. Tatsuya Nagashima translated it in the 1990's, and it was published by Arcana Press in Japan. We're very pleased to be able to get it in front of the world's Bible readers! Here's a link: 天界の秘義

We just imported another Spanish translation of one of Swedenborg's works: Continuación del Juicio Final. That makes 12, now, out of the 18 published works. The biggest works lie ahead, but still, it’s progress! Take a look: Continuación del Juicio Final.

We've just added this Spanish translation of Swedenborg's work, "The White Horse" to our online library. Take a look: El Caballo Blanco.

We have received a lot of great questions from our website visitors over the years. We do our best to research and respond to each question individually, but haven't, until now, shared these "Q's and A's" with a wider audience. We've only added a handful of the most recent questions so far, but we will be adding more on a regular basis and hope this page will become a really useful resource for curious site visitors. Here's the page: Q & A.

That's the Spanish title of the newest translation in our online library. ¡Aquí y ahora!

We've just posted new commentary for Luke chapters 10, 11, and 12. For those of you who have been enjoying Ray Silverman's "Four Gospels, A Seamless Garment" work so far, this will be be fun. If you're coming in on it in the middle, you might want to jump back to Matthew 1 and start from there.

We've just deployed a new "videos hub". We've gathered data on close to 1200 videos from New Christian producers, and brought it together in one place – a searchable clearinghouse. When the videos refer to Bible verses, we make links, so we will be able to offer readers videos that are relevant to what they're reading. Should be fun and useful - check it out here!

We've imported and linked up the first half of an Italian translation of True Christian Religion. It was translated by Loreto Scocia in 1880, and it's being updated by our friends at Fondazione Swedenborg.

We have posted brand new commentary for Psalms 90-99.

Here's brand new commentary for Luke chapter 8 and chapter 9.

Ray Silverman has just finished his commentary for Luke chapter 7. Here's the link to the chapter and the explanation. There's a lot of food for thought here!

We're really pleased to be publishing volume 10 of Swedenborg's "Arcana Coelestia", in Chinese. It explains the inner meaning of chapters 13-21 of Exodus. Here's a link.

Search engines like fast pages, and our pages weren't fast enough. So, we did another sprint to solve that, and it worked! Site speed has doubled since early August, even while traffic's been growing fast. And, speaking of traffic... for the first time ever, yesterday, we logged more than 500,000 visits in a 30 day period. That is pretty cool! There's a looong way to go before we play in the biggest leagues of Bible study sites, but we're up and coming.

Happy autumn, everyone. How did that happen already? Summer was way too short! Lots of news; we'll cram it into one post here.
- We imported a translation of "Gesprekken Met Engelen", or "Conversations with Angels" in Dutch. Our international translator community is really productive!
- We also added "Divine Providence" in Malayalam, a language of southwest India. Again, we're lucky/grateful to have such productive translators working in so many places.
- Our "Swedenborg Thesaurus" is growing, and we've been making it more user friendly. It's still mostly intended for translators, but... hey, if you're feeling studious, check it out on the Research Tools page.
- Advanced Search has handy new options for sorting search results.
- We've added an easier way for visitors/readers to ask questions. (Now, of course, we need more volunteer question-answerers! If that's you, get in touch...)
- We've made big improvements to the hub pages for spiritual topics and Bible stories. They're fast, they're more informative, and much more searchable.
- Reading plans have been getting some tender loving care. The whole UI is better, and we're adding multi-lingual versions rapidly.

Mara. A language of Southeast Asia. We knew nothing about it until one of the Mara translators wrote to us, asking if we would be willing to help get their new Mara Bible translation online. One of our big goals is to make the Word accessible to everyone, so we devoted a little time to it, and... here it is!

There are 200 million Indonesian speakers in the world, so we're really pleased to be adding this Indonesian Bible translation (Alkitab bahasa Indonesia) to our offerings. It currently includes the whole New Testament, and 6 Old Testament books.

Here is a brand new title in Malayalam that will help you understand how God operates in the universe and in your life.

我们死后会去什么地方吗？史威登堡将灵性世界描述为一个真实存在的 "地方"，它在一个与物质世界不同的层面上运行. 这里有一个链接.

El Señor quiere regalarnos un amor eterno en nuestros matrimonios. He aquí cómo prepararse para recibirlo.

We've just imported two more of Swedenborg's works, in Japanese translations. One is about the real nature of charity, 仁愛 . The other is a critique of traditional Christian thinking about the trinity, and a suggested new understanding of the true nature of God. Here's a link to it, too: ｱﾀﾅｼｵｽ信条.

We're pleased to bring you Ray Silverman's commentary for Luke chapters 3-6, hot off his keyboard. Here's the link to Chapter 3. These are really good.

We just posted a brand new translation of volume 9 of Swedenborg's "Arcana Coelestia", in Chinese. This translation project is moving fast! Here's a link.

Web visitors don't like waiting for pages to load. But they do like pages to be easy to use, nice to look at, and ready with all the functions they want. It's an ongoing challenge to provide features AND speed. For the last few days, we've been doing a speed "sprint". The early results look good; average page load times have been cut in half, to 2.77 seconds. This should be good all around!

For the 37 million Malayalam speakers of the world, here's the first ever translation of Swedenborg's work, "The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine", or "നവയെരുശലേമും അതിന്റെ സ്വർഗ്ഗീയ ഉപദേശവും", an overview of New Christian thought with many Bible references. Here's a link!

Here's a new translation of Swedenborg's short work on the interaction between the soul and the body. In Chinese, it's titled "灵魂与身体的相互作用", and here's a link!

We just posted another set of Swedenborg's Genesis exegesis, translated into Zulu by our friends in South Africa. Here's a link to the beginning of the new sections of "Izimfihlakalo Zezulu ", translated by Zamokhule T. Zungu.

Here's a link to a new-to-us translation of "An Appendix to The White Horse". It's really interesting; it seems to have been a draft of a letter, perhaps to the Royal Academy of Science. Was it ever sent? We don't know. But you can sure sense how important it is to Swedenborg that people should be able to know about the correspondences between natural and spiritual things.

Here's a newly updated version of Tatsuya Nagashima's translation of "The White Horse", or "De Equo Albo", as Swedenborg published it in Latin, way back in 1758. Here's a link to it!

We just added another new Malayalam translation, വിശുദ്ധ തിരുവെഴുത്തുകളുടെ ഉപദേശം, of Swedenborg's 1763 work on the nature of the Bible - how it really is holy, and how its literal stories contain an inner meaning, too. This translation, from English into Malayalam, was done by Peter Devassy. Here's a link to it!

Here's volume 8 of Arcana Coelestia, or "属天的奥秘", translated into Chinese, online and linked up!

Now, here's a link to our new Bible stories hub page. Like the topics page, it's faster, better-looking, and makes searching and filtering easier.

We've been doing a user interface sweep, streamlining, speeding things up, and making things beautiful. Here's a link to our new spiritual topics hub page. You can see more, and search faster. Hope you like it!

We just put up new commentaries for six more Psalms, from Rev. Julian Duckworth. If you read the Psalms side by side with these insights, it really helps you see more.

We just finished a Bible page speedup project, with very good results. Now, you can read and study and build a better life even faster! Seriously, we hope you'll like it.

On our Bible slider, there's a frog icon, for a tab where you can "hop to" Bible verses that relate to the chapter you're reading. (Yeah, it's a stretch, but it's a friendly icon.) Anyway, until yesterday, you would get a whole list of verses that related to your current chapter, but... you couldn't tell which verse related to which, nor could you see the verse text. But now you can! We think this is going to be REALLY useful. Hope you try it, and like it! Start with a Bible chapter, click the "Study" button, and then the frog tab.

The French translation of Apocalypse Revealed has been a weak spot in our lineup. It's from a scan, and contained many scan errors. There's some good news on this front: it's getting better! We've just posted a new update. There's still a ways to go before we're satisfied with it, but... it's coming along. Here's a link!

Swedenborg wrote a draft, "De Divino Sapientia", or "Divine Wisdom", as he was preparing for his 1763 work, De Divino Amore et de Divina Sapientia. As with many of his drafts, it's shorter and a little choppier than the published work. It's always interesting to see the draft-to-final evolution. Here's a link!

We just posted an updated version of Andersen's Spanish translation of Heaven and Hell. Here's a link!

A few days ago, we posted an article about the 7 "I am" statements in the Gospel of John. The research for that article pointed out this different path, too -- which we hadn't explored before. Time and again, Jesus says "I am", period. He's clearly saying that he is God Incarnate. Have a look!

Some of the old ways of thinking about this are... wrong!

How important is it to be Christian? What does the Bible say about it? Read our article on "Other sheepfolds".

When Jesus died on the cross, the veil of the temple in Jerusalem was "rent in twain" from top to bottom. It was a watershed event in spiritual history. Read about it here.

Here's Ray Silverman's commentary for Luke chapter 2 - as the series gets rolling. Here's the link.

How does the soul interact with the body? This was an interesting question in Swedenborg's time (and it still is). Swedenborg published "De Commercio Animae et Corporis", in London, in 1769. It's just been translated into Serbian (Srpski), titled Interakcija Duše i Tela. Here's a link!

Swedenborg wrote a draft, "De Divino Amore", or "Divine Love", as he was preparing for his 1763 work, De Divino Amore et de Divina Sapientia. It's good. Here's a link!

Way back in 1758, Swedenborg wrote a short exegetical work in Latin about the white horse that's described in Revelation 19. It's sort of a "vertical slice" of explaining, so you can get a sense of his method fairly quickly. It's been translated into 14 languages now, with the latest being Chinese. Here's a link.

Some of Swedenborg's theological works are really long. Some have a table of contents at the beginning, but many haven't had one, till this past weekend. Now they do. If you're reading a section, and you click the "Study this Passage" button, you'll see the Table on the slider. We're still improving them, so... if there are features you want, or problems you see, let us know. Meanwhile, hopefully you will be mostly "contented". :)

We're just posting new commentaries for six more Psalms, from Rev. Julian Duckworth. Get 'em while they're hot!.

Last year, we published chapter commentaries for the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, by Ray Silverman. They've been popular, and people have been asking for Luke and John! Ray's been working on Luke over the winter, and as chapters come out of the pipeline, we're going to publish them as a series. Here's the commentary for Luke chapter 1, side by side with its explanation.

"Arcana Coelestia", in Latin, means "Hidden things of heaven", in English. In Chinese, it's been translated "属天的奥秘". Swedenborg published this work in 8 thick volumes. Later printings have mostly split it into 12 books. It's a step by step analysis of the inner meaning of Genesis and Exodus. And here's volume 7, in Chinese, online and linked up!

Swedenborg's theological works are big. Useful, but big. We're always trying to make it easier to find things, e.g. with links to the Bible, the powerful search functions, research tools, and the right-side slider. Now we're adding Tables of Contents, filling in holes, and making existing ones more user-friendly. There's an example on this page.

Sacred Scripture. Holy Writing. Many cultures have ancient texts that they regard as being holy. In Christianity, the Bible dates back 3500 years at least, and contains fragments of much older stories. Why pay attention now? Swedenborg, writing in 1763, has still-relevant answers. And, now, here's a new Japanese translation of them: "Doctrine about the Sacred Scripture", or 聖書の教義.

Here's a new Japanese translation of, "Doctrine about The Lord", or 主の教義 in Japanese. This work focuses on how we can go back to the Word for a more accurate understanding of the nature of God. It was translated by Tatsuya Nagashima. Now we have 9(!) translations of Swedenborg's works in Japanese.

Have a look at this new article in our spiritual topics section: Here's a link to it: Free speech. Free thought. Free religion..

And now, dear readers, here are 8 more brand-new commentaries for Psalms 43-50, from Rev. Julian Duckworth. They will help vaccinate you against bad stuff. If you read them. :) Here's a link....

Here's a new-to-us Japanese translation of, "Doctrine for Life", or 生命の教義 in Japanese. It was translated by Tatsuya Nagashima. This brings us up to 8(!) translations of Swedenborg's works in Japanese. All linked to the Word, and cross-linked to each other -- pretty nice!

We just posted three new translations of works that Swedenborg published way back in 1758. They're from the New Century Edition's team at the Swedenborg Foundation, and they include a lot of interesting footnotes. They join "White Horse", their stablemate (had to work that in...) from Swedenborg's 1758 output, that we posted last month. Here are:

• New Jerusalem
• Last Judgment
• Other Planets

In the transcendent "I have a dream" speech, delivered to a great crowd in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, in 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. propounded some timeless ideas:

• Humankind should seek "the solid rock of brotherhood".
• "We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline."
• "Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive."
• "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

And, he weaves in the magnificent imagery from Amos 5:24, looking forward to a time when: "justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."

Read the whole thing.

We're delighted to bring you 5 more new commentaries for Psalms 38-42, from Rev. Julian Duckworth. These are really helping our readers; it's great to have these new ones.

In 2020, we received 4.1 million visits -- up more than 50% from 2019. It's good!

We just added more books to our Malayalam Bible translation, including most of the prophets and the whole New Testament. We have a lot of Malayalam readers, so this should be a very useful addition! Here's a link to it.