Bijbelverhalen uitgelegd

We're kicking off our annual summer student Swedenborg sweep, where we import translations of Swedenborg's works in many languages. We mark them up so that all the scripture references and cross-references are live links, and we put them online. We've got 312 work-translations online now, and 60 more on-deck for this summer. It would be a huge help to get more crowd-funding for this effort! If you feel moved to help, please donate.

NC Bible Study traffic report... Another record month: 230,000 visits in the last 30 days, up more than 15% in the past few weeks alone. We're gonna need a bigger server.

We get an influx of Divine Wisdom all the time, but today we linked up another book about it, so maybe more will be flowing through! Here's a link to Mongredien's English translation of a work that Swedenborg drafted in 1762: Divine Wisdom.

Late in his life, Swedenborg drafted an appendix to his capstone theological work, True Christian Religion. We've had English translations by Buss and Whitehead on the site for a while, but they hadn't been linked up. Now, we've exported them and used them to test our latest import/markup software, and... all the scripture references and cross-references are linked up. Here's a link where you can compare them side by side - Coronis: Buss vs. Whitehead

We just topped the 200,000 visits/month threshold. First time for that! We're up more than 30,000 places in the Alexa site rankings, too, in the last quarter. We're now ranked 158,890th globally, out of the more than 1.8 billion websites that exist.

We've started a rollout of a new feature: Bible reading plans. You might be thinking - wait, it's been a Bible Study site without reading plans? Well, er... yes - at least without plans like these, where you can "Read the Book of Joel in 3 Days" or "Read the New Christian Canon in 9 Months". Try one out, and let us know what functionality you would like us to add. Here's a "link to the page" (from the Bible menu).

We've seen 190,000 visits in the last 30 days. That's a new record for us! Many thanks to the many people who work in many ways to make project go.

We round-tripped "Precepts of the Decalog," an outline of seven articles that introduces the New Church and plans to show that the 10 commandments contain the essentials of religion. Swedenborg left this work in draft form, but the themes outlined in it are articulated in his published works.

This morning, in testing out latest automated markup routines, we round-tripped the Latin text of "Specimen and Sciagraphia", yet another of Swedenborg's works that he left in manuscript. We also marked up two English translations, by Duckworth and Whitehead as part of the testing. Here's a link to the Latin text: "Specimen and Sciagraphia".

We just round-tripped Dr. John Chadwick's English translation of "De Verbo", or "The Word", a small work that Swedenborg left unpublished. It's particularly interesting for its description of the Ancient Word, which pre-existed the Old and New Testaments. Here's a link to this work: "De Verbo".

We finished round-tripping Johnson's English translation of "Miracles and Signs", a small work that Swedenborg left unpublished. Here's a link to it: "Miracles and Signs".

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.