Book Proposal Competition

As a collaborative effort to generate dynamic book proposals and publications from aspiring authors, the General Church of the New Jerusalem and the Swedenborg Foundation, publisher of the theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg, are pleased to announce a new competition, called the Bridge Book Awards. The authors of the winning proposals will receive a cash award in the amount of $1,500, be honored at an awards ceremony, and be guaranteed a review by the Swedenborg Foundation Press editorial board with the possibility of publication.

There are 4 categories you can enter: The Afterlife, Living a Spiritual Life, Biblical Commentary from a Swedenborgian/New Church Perspective, and Swedenborg for Dummies.

Entries are due on February 1st, 2011 and must include an entry form, a query letter, a chapter outline or synopsis, and one to three sample chapters.

You can read more about what's required in the Entry Form (PDF) or in the news item about it on newchurch.org.

I'm excited to see what comes of this.

Why You Might Want to Invest in a Latin Copy of True Christian Religion

Freya Fitzpatrick has been working for a couple of years on a new Latin edition of Vera Christiana Religio (the book that's called True Christian Religion or True Christianity in English). The new Latin edition is now available and I wanted to share with you a little advertisement / explanation of why having new Latin editions is important that Freya wrote.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! A new Latin edition of True Christian Religion is available now at the low price of just $45 for a handsome red-bound, gold-lettered set of two volumes.

Well, OK, so you haven’t been sitting on the edge of your seat just waiting for this new release. And, maybe you’re wondering why you’re even being told about this when you can’t read a word of Latin – well maybe one or two words, but no more.

This project is important to you, and to me, and to the whole world because the Latin editions of the Writings are the foundation upon which translation into every other language depends.

Why can’t we just use existing Latin editions? Well, the first editions, published by Swedenborg himself are out of print, and extremely expensive if you could find them. The next editions were done in the 1800’s in Germany. They’re out of print too. The third Latin editions were edited and published in the USA in the early 1900’s, and these can still occasionally be found.

Newly edited editions (rather than reprints of older editions), however, are urgently needed because of the emergence of a new field of study called Neo-Latin. Neo-Latin generally describes Latin from the 1500s on, in other words, the Latin of Swedenborg’s day. Up until just about 1960 or so, Neo-Latin was not a recognized field of study. Scholars certainly knew that Latin was used during this period of history, but scholars had not studied the Latin of that era as unique in its own right.

This means that even the editions of the Writings from the early 1900’s are edited by people who “corrected” Swedenborg’s Latin to fit patterns of classical Latin – which are often very different in rules of spelling, grammar and punctuation than Neo-Latin. Also, Neo-Latin contains words that certainly didn’t exist in classical times, and in some places in older Latin editions, editors have attempted to suggest “correct” words to replace the words Swedenborg used – which as it turns out are legitimate Neo-Latin words.

This means new Latin editions are vital. But as you can imagine, the readership is infinitesimally small! We can sell less than half of the minimum number of books required for a print run.

You can support this use by purchasing a set of Vera Christiana Religio for: $45 plus shipping ($5 domestic, $30 international).

You can:

1) Display this Latin work with pride.
2) Designate it to be donated to a Latin student at Bryn Athyn New Church College (www.brynathyn.edu) or a minister.
3) Designate it to be donated to a Neo-Latin scholar.

If you would like to support this use at less than $45, send a check in any $5 increment and specify whether it is for donated set for a student, minister or scholar.

Checks should be made out to:

Academy of the New Church, memo: Publication Committee
And mailed to: Publication Committee, Leslie Alden, PO Box 45, Bryn Athyn, PA 19009

Download PDFs of Pott's Concordance

I've posted before about the advantages of using Pott's Concordance (AKA The Swedenborg Concordance: A Complete Work of References to the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg compiled by Rev. John Faulkner Potts). I've also posted before about how you can read parts of the concordance online.

But Rev. Clark Echols has just sent me even better news: you can download the whole concordance in PDF form. The files are available from the Internet Archive. If you search in their americana collection for John Faulkner Potts you get a list of results which includes links to the volumes of the concordance.

If you click on one of these results you get some information about the book and are given a couple of different options for viewing it. To save you some time I've collected all the links to the PDF versions by volume below. For some of the volumes there are 2 versions. I'd recommend the ones with smaller file sizes.

Volume I (A-C): version 1 (PDF, 57.2 MB), version 2 (PDF, 87.2 MB)
Volume II (D-F): version 1 (PDF, 87 MB)
Volume III (G-J): version 1 (PDF, 97.3 MB)
Volume IV (K-N): version 1 (PDF, 54.8 MB), version 2 (PDF, 98 MB)
Volume V (O-Sq): version 1 (PDF, 52.4 MB), version 2 (PDF, 94 MB)
Volume VI (St-Z): version 1 (PDF, 48 MB), version 2 (PDF, 80 MB)

As you can see these are chunky files so they may take a while to download and may be a little sluggish to navigate through with your PDF viewer but, now you have the entire concordance on your computer whenever you want it and now you can search it electronically.

What I'm guessing you want to do now is take the text version of these scans, clean them up, and build a brilliant little website that has all the references linked so that you can easily read the full passage.

Cool Stuff Having to Do with Arcana Coelestia

When Swedenborg published volume 1 of Arcana Coelestia it was listed in the Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer. This was the first advertisement for any book of the Writings. There's an online archive of the Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer or London Magazine, as it was later called. You can see the first listing of Arcana Coelestia here. I know that other advertisements and letters about Swedenborg and his works were also published in this magazine; let me know if you find any of them.

Volume 1 didn't sell well (see Spiritual Experiences 4422). So Swedenborg decided to publish volume 2 of it, chapter by chapter, in English and in Latin.

When the first chapter of volume 2 was published, Swedenborg's English publisher, John Lewis, wrote a fascinating letter about it to be published in the Daily Advertiser. You can read this letter on pp492-497 of Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg by R.L. Tafel, which can be found online in Google Book Search.

You can download a PDF of a scan of the 1750 English translation of chapter 16 of Arcana Coelestia—a 100dpi version (6MB). (This PDF was provided by the Lord's New Church (www.thelordsnewchurch.com). It is no longer available on their website so the link is to the file on their site using the Wayback Machine / Internet Archive. They have other Free Swedenborg Books Online on their web site, in English, Dutch, Croatian, and Latin.)

This translation was by John Marchant*, who later also translated Brief Exposition (you can find his translation of it here). It's fun to look at this translation to see how it was laid out and how the Latin was translated back then. Rev. Jonathan Rose, series editor of the New Century Edition and translator of True Christian Religion, told me that he thinks the translation is good—"lively and in real English."

* A note on page 249 of Scribe of Heaven says this about Marchant: "Marchant was an English writer and compiler of the mid-eighteenth century who wrote on current events and literary themes such as the Bible and Paradise Lost. His dates of birth and death were not available to the authors, though erroneously specified in Hyde 1906, page 731. In some cases his name is given as Merchant."

Read the Swedenborg Epic Online

Another thing you can find at the Swedenborg Digital Library is Cyriel Sigstedt's The Swedenborg Epic: The Life and Works of Emanuel Swedenborg. This is, I've been told, a good sympathetic biography of Swedenborg—that is, it doesn't dispute his claims about allowed to experience the spiritual world etc.

Anyone read this book and want to leave a short review of it?

Read Parts of Swedenborg Concordance Online

Glancing around the Swedenborg Digital Library I found a page with links to parts of Potts' Swedenborg Concordance that are available to read online through Google Book Search. It's not the same as being able to digitally search and copy and paste the text and click on the references and view them (which I'm hoping will happen in my lifetime) but it's a start.

UPDATE:
I've now discovered that you can "Download PDFs of Pott's Concordance". You might also be interested to read Stephen Cole on Using Pott's Concordance vs. Electronic Tools for Studying the Heavenly Doctrines

Interesting New Bible Translation Approach Reviewed by Stephen Muires

The Ancient Roots Translinear Bible uses a fascinating, different approach to translating the Old Testament. For each Hebrew word it uses just one English word, rather than using different English words in different contexts to try to cover the range of meaning of the Hebrew word.

The author explains how this is different from an interlinear and why he wanted this sort of translation for himself.

[W]hat would happen if all the all the ancient words matched the English language 100% of the time? You wouldn’t need a cross reference column. You wouldn’t need to compare them in an Interlinear bible. You wouldn’t need to double check the original word in a concordance.

Or think about the number of footnotes in a typical study bible. Have you ever noticed that many footnotes tell you the "real" meaning of the word? In ARTB, the "real" word is in the text! So the number of footnotes is dramatically reduced. ...all those reference books could be put on a shelf, and you'd be free to soak in the word of God.

Theolog Stephen Muires was the one who told me about this translation and he wrote a really interesting review of it on Amazon.com.

I didn't believe at first that the Hebrew actually had these possible meanings, but with a concordance and a dictionary and an interlinear Bible I have to admit that these translations are probably good. Not "better", since they lack the poetic flow and the evocative imagery of the KVJ/NIV. But good, instructive, tantalizing, and prodding deeper research into the meaning of the words. It creates an effect of a deeper meaning shining out, not poetic, but more like metal ore shines out of hard stone.

You can read and search the whole text for free online.

Heaven and Hell Considered to Be a Spiritual Classic

Theolog Coleman Glenn found a book on Amazon.com called 50 Spiritual Classics: Timeless Wisdom from 50 Great Books on Inner Discovery, Enlightenment and Purpose. He writes,

One of the 50 classics is Heaven and Hell, and the author gives it a very positive (and accurate) assessment, neither dismissing the teachings about hell nor claiming that it must be a work of Swedenbog's imagination.

He also notes that if you go down to “Search Inside This Book” and search for 246 and then 249 you can read the chapter about Heaven and Hell.