Sujets spirituelles

Courtesy of our friends at Swedenborg Boekhuis in the Netherlands, and some hard work by our team, here's a linked-up translation of Swedenborg's capstone work, "Ware Christelijke Religie".

We're now offering pathways -- ways that people can explore particular areas of interest, and easily find true ideas that they can use in their lives. Here's a link to the main pathways page.

We're seeing more than 183,000 visits/month now, which is around 2.2 million per year, almost double last year's pace.

We just imported the latest episodes of Jonathan Rose's Spirit and Life bible study series. Here's a link to part 1 of his new 7-part series, "A Way Forward."

We just added a Russian UI to the site, thanks to generous translation help from friends of the project in Ukraine - newchristianbiblestudy.org/ru.

We just added a "read-aloud" function to the site, to help with handicapped accessibility (and with multi-tasking). Look for the little speaker icon near the content titles on each page - click to play, click again to stop.

We just added a new user interface in Georgian (as in the Republic of Georgia). Christianity there dates back at least to the early 4th century, and now a New Christian group is thriving there.

We've been pleased to get a nice set of brief explanations of spiritual topics and doctrinal terms, from Rev. Julian Duckworth. You'll find more than 160 of them from our "spiritual topics" hub page. Here's a link to one example entry on "Wars".

We added 87 more of the Spirit and Life Bible Study Classes by Jonathan Rose. This brings our total to 268. There are some really good titles here, e.g. "What to Think and Do During Temptations", and "What to Do about a Falling Star Problem".

We've been deploying some more improvements to our search functionality. Excerpts in search results get you to the right neighborhood quickly. Highlighting in search results is better. Navigation between results is easier. The hit counter is more intuitive. You can show all results, if the first 500 aren't enough. Lots of nice new touches to make your searching faster and easier.

We just imported 180 of Jonathan Rose's Bible Study classes. These are interesting, in-depth talks with reference links to the Bible, making it easy for you to follow along as you watch the videos. We link from the Bible text to these talks, where relevant references are made. The whole series can also be found here. Many thanks to Jonathan and his team for the permission to use these!

We're making search easier (and more powerful, too but that's another blog post...). If you're reading the Word, in, say, the American Standard translation, and you want to search for a word or phrase in that same translation, there's now a quick search box just above the Next/Previous navigation. Same goes for Swedenborg's works, and for explanations.

We just topped 140,000 visits for the last 30 days - a new record for us, and a 100% year on year growth rate.

Page load times have been cut from a tedious 1.5 seconds in August, to 0.6 seconds in October. We did a bunch of work to optimize data retrieval, and... it's working!

We have been rolling out some search function updates, improving speed, and providing more search and navigation options. The quicksearch function from the main toolbar is back. You might need to clear your browsing history, or close and re-open your browser, if search results aren't showing at first.

Here's another new story explanation from the Swedenborg Foundation, this time about the first commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods...".

We just posted a new story explanation, on the famed, and feared, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Here's a link to the story..

We just posted a Chinese translation of the second half of True Christian Religion. Here's a link to section 1.

We just imported an Italian translation of Heaven and Hell done in 2012 by Fondazione Swedenborg in Italy. Here's a link to section 1 of Cielo e inferno.

For our Czech-speaking friends..., there's now a Czech user interface on the site! With a Czech UI, the Czech Bible, and 10 of Swedenborg's works translated into Czech, it's a good place to be. newchristianbiblestudy.org/cs

Here's a just-added Italian translation of one of Swedenborg's works: L’Amore Coniugale.

We've just posted two more translations of Heaven and Hell, one in German, and one in Swedish:
- Himmel und Hölle
- Om Himlen och Helvetet

We're just wrapping up a highly successful translation-importing summer work session. With help from 5 high school and college students, other volunteers, and our core team, we imported 51 more translations of books of the Writings, bringing the total to 233. We're now offering Swedenborg's works online, linked to the Word and to each other, in 17 languages, which are spoken by more than 3.7 billion people.

Over the last three weeks we have imported over 30 new translations of Emanuel Swedenborg's works. We have covered many different works, in a variety of languages, including: Russian, German, Dutch, Czech, Korean, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, and Georgian. Read more about our progress here.

1. We just imported a Chinese translation of Conjugial Love. That brings the count of Chinese translations to 5! Only 13 more to go.

2. We've had over 1 million visits to the website in the past 12 months! If website traffic continues to grow at the same rate, we'll see 2 million visits in the next 12 months.

We just topped the 110,000 visits/month threshold. How 'bout that?

We just imported a New Century Edition translation of one of Swedenborg's works, entitled "The Lord".

We just imported a Korean translation of Doctrine of the Lord. Take a look!