Sujets spirituelles

Is it a spiritual awakening? Has the coronavirus pandemic gotten people to start thinking about what's most important in their lives? We don't know. But traffic is way up.

Get more out of reading the Book of Joshua. We've just added explanations of chapters 5-9: Exploring the Meaning of Joshua 5

Here's a brand new thing: a Serbian user interface!.

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved." - Helen Keller

Our friends at offTheLeftEye did a coronavirus-related show on their youtube channel last night. It's a friendly, helpful conversation with the usual thought-provoking ideas. Here are some places where we connect to it:

Matthew 6: Follow the link, click "Study the Inner Meaning", and use the Video tab on the sliding pane.

Heaven and Hell 281, Secrets of Heaven 8478, The Doctrine of Life for the New Jerusalem 114, and Secrets of Heaven 1392. Follow the links, and when you're reading, click the "Study this Passage" button, and then use the Video tab on the sliding pane.

Partway through his super-detailed commentary on Genesis and Exodus, Swedenborg took a detour into the New Testament, and explained the internal meaning of two chapters in the Gospel of Matthew - chapters 24 and 25. It's interesting to see this. By extension, it helps us to better understand the rest of gospels. We've gathered up the links you'll need, and put them into the chapter summaries, for Matthew 24 and 25.

We just posted a translation of Swedenborg's work, "The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine", into Chinese. Take a look: 新耶路撒冷及其天堂教义

We just rolled out an updated Russian User Interface. Thanks to Theo!

We posted a brand-new Chinese translation of Swedenborg's "Apocalypse Revealed". It's got nothing to do with coronavirus! However, it IS an interesting look at the inner meaning of the Book of Revelation, and if you happen to be a Chinese reader, well... it was written in Latin 250+ years ago, and it's been available in many translations - but not in Chinese, until... now!
Here's a link: 破解啟示錄

While we're in helpful document mode, here's a new Quick Start Guide in .pdf format, designed to help new site visitors get a sense of what all's here and how it works.

We've put together a new Search Tips Guide in .pdf format. Searching is an interesting challenge, where most of the time users want it to be simple and fast - but then occasionally they want it to be very specific. We're always trying to accommodate the whole range of needs. This document should be pretty useful for times when you want help with a tricky search!

We've now translated our 295 spiritual topic articles into 14 languages. We've been working on a way to integrate the best machine translation tools into our system, so we get decent output. This is the first large-scale rollout of it. It should be pretty useful!

Courtesy of our friends at SPI, we've just posted a new Spanish translation of "Doctrina de la Nueva Jerusalén Acerca de la Fe", (or, in English, The Doctrine of the New Jersualem Regarding Faith).

"In short we can say today that man is far too clever to be able to survive without wisdom.... The exclusion of wisdom from economics, science, and technology was something which we could perhaps get away with for a little while, as long as we were relatively unsuccessful; but now that we have become very successful, the problem of spiritual and moral truth moves into the central position." (E.F. Schumacher, from his book, "Small is Beautiful", in 1973.)

1. February 18th - We rolled out an updated Chinese UI. Thanks to Helen!
2. February 19th - Here comes a newly refreshed Georgian UI. Thanks to Bagrat!
3. February 20th - And, today, how about a brand-new machine-translated Italian UI? With thanks to the thousands of computer scientists who are figuring that out in a hurry!

How in the world does the Book of Joshua have anything to say about my life today?
Well... it's a good question. And the reason we're highlighting it is that Rev. Julian Duckworth is exploring its inner meaning in a series of essays, one per chapter. So far, we have 4 essays, and they'll keep coming over the next couple of months. Here's a link to the first one: Exploring the Meaning of Joshua 1

1. It's like breakfast cereal: It's new! Improved! Our Czech user interface is both of those. And it's a good way to start your day, too. Here's what it looks like: newchristianbiblestudy.org/cs

2. Or, it's like laundry detergent: It's new! Improved! This time we're talking about an update to our Portuguese UI. It's been updated by friends of the project in Brazil, and... like spiritual laundry detergent, it will help you find ways to get nice clean truth. Here's what it looks like: newchristianbiblestudy.org/pt

We just finished the latest iOS and Android versions of the NCBS app. It's a traveler's handy Writings read/search program, for use when you don't have web access. If you're interested in using it, contact us!

In January, we focused on translating a bunch of things: Spiritual topics, Bible story explanations, reading plan names and descriptions, pathway names and descriptions, and more of the UI text. We're using two neural machine translation (AI) engines (from DeepL and Google) to help, and we're getting really good results.

We just marked up and imported 2500 more sections of the fast-developing Chinese translation of Arcana Coelestia, so... it's about 1/3 of the way now, and moving quickly.

When he was working through the process of writing "Apocalypse Revealed", Swedenborg compiled an index. He didn't publish it, but it survived among his papers and manuscripts, and it's a really useful reference. Here it is, online and linked up!

We've been helping the creators of the popular youtube channel, offTheLeftEye with database support. As part of that partnership, we cross-link their videos to the text of the Bible, and to Swedenborg's works. So, if you're reading along in the Bible, and there's a related video, you'll see it on the Bible slider pane. 300 of their videos have been fully cross-indexed now by a team of volunteers, with around 400 more to go.

In the last month, we've set new web traffic records again. More than 264,000 visitors have come to the site this month, up 26% from this time last year.

We've been on a roll, in importing both Dutch and Japanese translations. The roll continues; here are links to:
1) A Dutch translation by Anton Zelling of Swedenborg's little work, Coronis, "Coronis - Aanhangsel tot Ware Christelijke Godsdienst".
2) A Japanese translation by Tatsuya Nagashima, of "Divine Providence": 神の摂理
That's 20 translations in Dutch, now, and 6 in Japanese.

We just imported another Dutch translation, by Henk Weevers, of Swedenborg's work on Divine Providence. It's all linked up to scripture references and cross references. Here's a link: Gods Voorzienigheid

We just topped the 250,000 visits/month mark.

It's morning in Japan, as we post this, so... if you're a Japanese reader waking up and wanting to read some reassuring things about the afterlife, here's a link to a translation of Heaven and Hell.

Here's a link to a new Dutch translation by Henk Weevers, of Swedenborg's work "Conjugial Love", on the powerful potential for true love in marriage: Echtelijke Liefde

Our friends at the Swedenborg Foundation have recently published The Moment Is Now - Carl Bernhard Wadström’s Revolutionary Voice on Human Trafficking and the Abolition of the African Slave Trade.

To learn more about how this book sheds light on the life and thought of Emanuel Swedenborg and the impact his thought has had on others, visit The Moment Is Now product page.

We just imported a new-to-us Japanese Bible translation. It's more complete than the other version we have on the site, so Japanese speakers will have a much better chance of finding what they are looking for! Here's a link: Japanese Kougo (Colloquial) Version.

We just posted a nice cleanup/update to the Korean translation of Divine Love and Wisdom, courtesy of YoungHee. Here's a link to it: 하나님의 사랑과 하나님의 지혜. We now have 10 translations of Swedenborg's works online in Korean, and the Korean UI is in good shape, too, so... we've got good momentum there.

Our "matching machine" has just added 1108 new matched words in Swedish, Dutch, Czech, Norwegian, and Russian. We're highlighting those words for Bible readers. We're now wanting to find bilingual people in those languages who can review a list of "maybe matched" words, too, so... if you can help, get in touch!

We just ran our German and Portuguese Bible translations through our "matching machine" and can now reliably highlight 863 more words (in many thousands of occurrences!) in those languages. There are a bunch more words that are "maybes" -- if you speak German or Portuguese, and have time to look through a list, get in touch!.

We just added the linked-up text of Volume 4 of Dr. Z. T. Zungu's translation of Arcana Coelestia into Zulu. Many thanks to our friends in the General Church of the New Jerusalem in South Africa for their permission to use this text! If you haven't seen Zulu yet, take a look; it's a beautiful language. Here's a link.

We fed our Italian and Spanish Bible translations into our new "matching machine", and added 800+ new terms with defined symbolic meanings that we're highlighting in the text. We'd welcome help from Spanish and/or Italian-speaking volunteers to help look over a list of "maybe match" words.

We've just deployed nice updates to the Korean translations of Swedenborg's works regarding Faith, Life, the Lord, and the Sacred Scripture, thanks to some hard work by YoungHee. Here's a "link". It makes these translations a lot more readable.

We've been working hard on a more advanced, more accurate way of highlighting words in the Bible text that have symbolic meaning at deeper levels. Readers are going to start seeing the fruits of that. We just added 1611 new English terms, and updated 627 more. Next up is French. Stay tuned! If this method works, we'll be able to do every language that has spaces between words -- so we'll have to find another way to achieve highlighting in Japanese and Chinese.

Of course it's no good having Korean translations online if you can't read the website they're on. We've just deployed a big update to our Korean UI text, too, thanks to some hard work by Woon Jeong. Here's a "link". When, for each language we try to support, we can combine a good UI, a good Bible translation, good translations of Swedenborg's works, and good explanations of stories, chapters, topics, words, etc., then we're really cooking.

We just posted a Korean translation of Swedenborg's capstone theological work, True Christian Religion. Here's a link: "참된 기독교 ". Many thanks to Rev. Yang for his permission to use it, and to HyunJin and YoungHee for their hard work in editing and marking up the text. For our thousands of Korean readers, this is important progress!

We just finished importing Henk Weevers' Dutch translation, "De hemelse Verborgenheden die in de Heilige Schrift of het Woord van de Heer". Many thanks to our friends in the Netherlands for their permission to use this, and for their great labor of translation. Also, special thanks to Ellie for sticking to the task of making thousands of edits to the markup. This translation goes up to section 6626, so far, out of 10083 sections, so there will be more to come... but for Dutch readers, this is already a huge milestone in being able to see into the inner meaning of the Bible.