AmaThuluzi okuSebenza ka Swedenborg

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.

For a long time, we've wanted to make links for our Bible readers to listen to music that relates to what they're reading. We've finally gotten to that point in our project work list... so we're rolling it out. If, for example, you're reading Isaiah 9, you'll see a blue music icon that offers you some music that relates to the text there, "For unto us a child is born". Here's a . You can listen while you browse!

We've gathered some great Christmas music. You can listen while you browse! Here's a link to it. Hope you enjoy it!

We've just deployed a Zulu user interface, thanks to a lot of help from our New Christian friends in South Africa. Here's a link to it, showing Swedenborg's great exegetical work, Arcana Coelestia, translated as Izimfihlakalo Zezulu.

We just processed and imported a new-to-us French translation of "de Charitate", or "About Charity", a Latin work of Swedenborg's that he wrote in 1766, but left in draft form. It's interesting. One running theme is that a big part of charity is doing one's job honestly, justly, and faithfully. Here's a link.

Well, if you've been following along at home... you've probably noticed that we're on a streamlining-the-user-interface kick. We're using more icons and less text. Navigation is getting more consistent. Menus are getting shorter. Layouts are getting cleaner. And... after some wrestling, pages are faster, too! Stay tuned; more's coming.

Some super-studious users have wanted a way to keep a list of cross-links to Swedenborg's Bible exegesis open, while they do research, looking back and forth. So... we just added a way to do it. If you're logged in with a user account, and you're on a Bible page, you get a button that will let you toggle into this three-column view.

One thing that users have been asking for has been a better interface for seeing word/phrase explanations from the Bible text. So, we worked on that - and now we've enabled explanation intros that pop up when you hover over the highlighted word. You can get a quick look at the meaning behind the text without much interruption. If you want to read more, you can just click the highlighted word in the Bible text, and get a fuller explanation.

Here are 4 more new commentaries for Psalms 34-37, from Rev. Julian Duckworth. These are really a help; there are so many psalms that they can seem like a blur, but Julian's research and thoughtful approach makes them, well, approachable! Here's a link!

We just posted a good chapter summary for Genesis 46, by Helen Kennedy. It's the story of Joseph settling his family in the Land of Goshen. The literal story has lists of names of Joseph's brothers and their descendants, but - of course - the story has an inner meaning for us that's helpful. Here's a link!

One of the challenges of having SOOO much text online is that it sometimes has mistakes in it, or cross-links that didn't get made. We've been on a small text-cleaning binge, e.g. fixing links in John Elliott's English translation of Arcana Coelestia, and in Risto Rundo's translation of the same work into Serbian, and in other translations in Japanese, German, Czech, Spanish, and French. Many thanks to the New Christian scholars around the world who help us "crowd-source" this effort!

We just posted more new chapter commentaries for Psalms 17-26, from Rev. Julian Duckworth. People are really liking these! Here's a link!

Swedenborg's great exegetical work, Arcana Coelestia, from the 1750's, describes the inner meaning of the books of Genesis and Exodus. The late Rev. Risto Rundo, a Swedenborgian scholar and theologian, translated it into Serbian. We got permission to use it, and hyperlink it, and... here it is! It's far from perfect (we've had a hard time getting our text processing routines to work with this text), but it's good enough to be useful, and it's online, (and we'll keep fixing links and formatting.) Zdravo Svete!

There are more than 30 million Tagalog speakers in the Philippines, and around the world. And... we get a lot of visitors who come to read the Bible in a Tagalog translation. So, we made a user interface for them, too. Courtesy of our friend Luri - thank you! Here's a link.

The new version of the "Swedenborg Reader" app from the New Christian Bible Study is available now in Google's Play Store and Apple's App Store! If you want to be able to read and search Swedenborg's works on your phone or tablet, when you DON'T have a reasonable web connection, this is the way! You can read, listen, print, share, cite... lots of good new features. Hope you try it, and like it! Here's a link.

We just posted new chapter commentaries for Psalms 31, 32, and 33, from Julian Duckworth. The explanations are good; we think you'll get new, useful insights from them. Here's a link!

We just marked up and imported a Chinese translation of volume 6 (of 12!) of "Arcana Coelestia". It contains Swedenborg's explanations of the internal meaning of chapters 32-38 of Genesis. Here's a link to the place where the latest installment of 属天的奥秘 begins.

Swedenborg penned a brief (for him) "Invitatio" to the New Church, in 1771, near the end of his publishing career. It's a useful overview of New Christian thought. We just posted a Dutch translation of it, by Anton Zelling, here: Uitnodiging tot de Nieuwe Kerk.

Last week, we published chapter commentaries for the Gospel of Matthew. This week, we've readied Ray Silverman's explanations of the Gospel of Mark. We're getting good feedback on these; people are finding them to be really useful. Here's a link to Mark chapter 1, side by side with its explanation.

We're really pleased to bring you commentaries from Rev. Julian Duckworth on the inner meaning of 8 more Psalms. Here's a link to Psalm 9 with its commentary.

Today, we surpassed the 350,000 visits/month rate, up 49% from this time last year!

This morning, we took another step towards having a good working set of Spanish translations of everything. Here's an updated translation of Swedenborg's work, "Doctrine about Life""Doctrina de Vida para la Nueva Jerusalén".

Way back in 1758, Emanuel Swedenborg, one of history's great Bible scholars, picked up his quill pen and started to explain the internal sense of the "Book of Revelation". In 1759, he left off with this 5 volume manuscript, and turned to other work. Later, he came back to "Revelation", rewrote his exegesis of it, and published "Apocalypse Revealed", in two Latin volumes, in 1766. After Swedenborg's death in 1772, his heirs and readers published many of his works that had been left in manuscript, including "Apocalypsis Explicata". It's been translated into English at least twice. We just cleaned up John Whitehead's translation of it, fixing hundreds of problems that were lingering from our first attempt to mark it up for online use.

We're having a big week. We just posted chapter summary explanations for each chapter in the Gospel of Matthew. They're by Rev. Dr. Ray Silverman, the editor of "Light in My Darkness", by Helen Keller, and the author of "Rise Above It", a popular multi-faith spiritual guidebook. Here's a link to Matthew chapter 1, side by side with Ray's explanation of it, and of course you can navigate from there!

We've been posting chapter-level commentaries on the inner meaning of the Psalms. We just got more new ones from Rev. Julian Duckworth, for Psalms 51-58, and 76-83. They're very good! Here's a link to Psalm 51 with its commentary.

If they do, we can help! We just posted another chunk of Swedenborg's Genesis exegesis, translated into Zulu by friends in South Africa. Here's a link to "Izimfihlakalo Zezulu ", translated by Zamokhule T. Zungu.

We shall see... we're pretty sure that some will! We just imported a Serbian translation of "Bračna Ljubav". It's a book about the wonderful potential for love in marriage, by Swedenborg, written in 1768. The introduction to this translation is quite beautiful; we want to get it translated into many languages, too. Here's a link to "Bračna Ljubav".

Our Latin sweep continues with the posting of a revised text of "Summaria Expositio Sensus Interni Librorum Propheticorum Verbi Veteris Testamenti, Necnon Et Psalmorum Davidis". In this 1761 work, Emanuel Swedenborg outlined the internal meaning of the Prophetical Books from Isaiah to Malachi, the Psalms, and the first 16 chapters of Genesis. This work was not published by Swedenborg, but it is largely consistent with other more detailed treatments made in his published works. Here's a link to it.

We just imported another Swedish translation, "Levernes-lära för Nya Jerusalem". It's one of four short works by Swedenborg in 1763 that focus on what the Bible says about Life, Faith, the Lord, and the Sacred Scripture. In English, the title is, "Doctrine of Life for the New Jerusalem". It's a translation by C. J. N. Manby from 1918, and it's online and hyperlinked for the first time, a mere 102 years later! Here's a link to it, side by side with the original Latin text.

Every time we mark up and import a translation of "Arcana Coelestia" in a new language, it's a big milestone. And... now we have just posted a German one! It's an update of the 1867 Basel edition (J.F.I. Tafel's translation), edited by Dr. Friedemann Horn, and published by Swedenborg Verlag in Zurich, in 1998.

We've started posting chapter-level commentaries on the inner meaning of the Psalms. They're coming in batches. We have them for Psalms 1-8, and 26-29 so far. Here's a link to Psalm 5 with its commentary.

We are really pleased to offer "Doctrine about Faith", or 第四部信仰についての新エルサレムの教義 in Japanese.