Инструменты исследования Сведенборга

We're starting to ripple the symbolic meanings of Bible words into Dutch and German; the first batches of matched words just got posted over the weekend. Lots more to do, but this rippling process is working, and that's good!

Thanks to our wonderful bilingual volunteers, we were able to deploy updates to our Russian and Georgian interfaces.

We've just deployed a Japanese user interface. That makes 12 UIs so far, so New Christian ideas are becoming available to something like 4 billion people.

If you're an English-speaking Bible reader, you've probably seen the blue highlighted words in the text of Bibles on our site. They link to popup explanations of the symbolism of those words.

We've been trying to figure out how to reliably find and highlight the right words and phrases in the many other languages we offer, and then to offer explanations of them... and we've made some of the needed breakthroughs. Two weeks ago, we went live with our first batch of 300+ highlighted words that occur thousands of times in the Spanish Bible texts.

This is a bridge across a previously unbridged chasm. Last week, we added the first waves of French and Portuguese words. Today, we added close to 500 Italian words. We'll add more sophistication to our programs so we can handle more ambiguous words and multi-word phrases, and tackle tougher languages. Plus, we have to translate all the popup explanations, so... lots and lots to do.

But, this is really something, something important for the New Christian movement worldwide. More readers worldwide can start to get a sense of the internal sense of the Word. Here's a link to a Spanish Bible example in Genesis.

Swedenborg wrote in Latin. Lots of Latin! His biggest work was entitled "Arcana Coelestia", which has been translated into English as "Heavenly Secrets" and "Secrets of Heaven". In it, Swedenborg works his way through Genesis and Exodus, and describes the inner spiritual meaning of those ancient scriptures.

One of our current projects has been to clean up the online Latin text of "Arcana Coelestia". If we can get the Latin clean and tidy, with links to scripture citations and cross-references, it will help translators render this work into more languages a lot more easily.

We've just put up a not-too-bad version of the Latin text, and we're making further updates as we go.

1. For our Portuguese readers, we just deployed an updated Portuguese user interface.

2. And, we have a new UI in Dutch, courtesy of our friends in the Netherlands.

3. Good things come in threes: We've also deployed an updated Czech-language UI, thanks to a helpful bilingual volunteer in the Czech Republic.

We just posted a German translation of Swedenborg's explanation of the inner meaning of the prophetic Bible books of the Old Testament, and the Psalms. Have a look: Gedrängte Erklärung des inneren Sinnes der Propheten und der Psalmen Davids.

We just linked up an Italian translation of the first two volumes of Arcana Coelestia, explaining the inner meaning of the first 17 chapters of Genesis. Here's a link: Arcani Celesti

Our summertime team of students is wrapping up its work. One of the BIG results is a much-improved hyperlinked version of the JF Potts translation of Swedenborg's great Bible exegesis, Arcana Coelestia. English-speaking Bible readers will be spoiled for choice; they now have 3 nicely-linked-up translations to choose from.

Good news: The New Century Edition translation of Arcana Coelestia, entitled "Secrets of Heaven", is now available on our site. This was Swedenborg's biggest theological work - an explanation of the inner meaning of Genesis and Exodus. So far, we have the first two volumes of this edition, and more are coming down the pike. If you really want to "get" why the Bible is still germane, important, helpful, and sacred, read Secrets of Heaven.

De Domino is a short work that Swedenborg drafted but didn't publish. It was a precursor to his published work, "Doctrine of the Lord". Anyway... we've just linked up all the references in the Latin text of De Domino, and the text of two English translations of it. Here it is.

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".