Tuesday, November 30, 2010

New Church Christmas Readings

There are 2 ways you can get New Church Christmas readings this season.

The pastors of the Glenview New Church have put together readings on the theme of “Walking with the Lord.” You can read a description of the program, sign up to receive the readings in daily emails, or download a PDF of all the readings.

The pastors of the Olivet New Church have also put together daily readings. Their theme is “A New Birth.” You can read a description of the program or sign up to receive the readings in daily emails.

Both daily email programs start sending emails tomorrow so sign up today if you want to receive all of them.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Results of Swedenborgian Thought Survey

About a month ago I wrote a post about some surveys that Wendy Soneson put together to study present day thinking about Swedenborg's Writings. The results and her conclusions are now available on a website called Swedenborgian Thinking Today.

On the site there are the "Defining Faith" survey results and the "That's me in the Corner" survey results. For both Wendy gives some explanation of her thinking behind each question and how people tended to respond. She also provides some background on the survey and her thoughts about the implications of the survey results for evangelization.

The most interesting thing on the site to me, though, is a page where she describes the groups of believers that she observed in the survey results.
Based on the survey and communications related to the survey questions, I here group the respondents into categories. As an artist, I often turn to the arts, and now, songwriting, to help give a flavor of the group’s thinking. I use songs, loosely interpreted and with apologies to the writers, to give a right brain slant to these left-brain studies. Each group formed when I felt more than ten people fit the description. Surely there are more groups to come.