Новини

The stories in the Book of Exodus are old. They're about things that happened to the Children of Israel a long time ago. If they didn't contain an internal sense, they'd just be old stories. But they do. Swedenborg described the internal sense of this text 260 years ago, in his great exegetical work, "Arcana Coelestia." Brad Sheahan has worked his way through those many volumes, trying to distill the key teachings, and describe how they apply to our lives today. He's good at it. You can read Exodus side-by-side with his commentaries, and come away with a fresh understanding and some ideas you can put to use every day.

Our Swedenborg Reader App 5.1.1 released has just been approved for distribution for Windows computers. You can get it in Microsoft's Windows App Store, free. Like its Android, iOS, and MacOS stablemates, it includes the Bible text, plus all the cross-linking you could wish for.

We're pleased to bring you the rest of the updated Gospel of Matthew explanations by Ray and Star Silverman. As they worked through their study of the four gospels, and how they form a seamless garment, they learned a lot! As they went back through Matthew, they've been making some updates, and we just put the rest of the updates online. Also... readers have asked about getting these commentaries in printed book form -- and that's coming! Watch this space; we'll keep you apprised.

We just deployed a few more features in another release of the Swedenborg Reader app. Just as a reminder, this generation includes Bible text, plus all the cross-linking you could wish for. For this point release, there are new Android and iOS releases, plus a MacOS one. Soon, too, there will be another Windows App one (after we jump it through a few more hoops). Happy updating, and happy reading!

We've been serializing the Silverman's commentaries on the Four Gospels ever since they began them several years ago. Now, they're getting ready to put them into book form, too, which is going to be good. As part of that process, they're making some revisions -- especially since they've learned new things as they've been going along. We're happy to bring you the latest revisions to the explanations of chapters 1-5 of Matthew's gospel. Here's a link to the first one: Exploring the Meaning of Matthew 1

New: We just posted new chapter summaries by Brad Sheahan for Genesis 12-50, covering the whole great story arc for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There's an internal sense -- actually several layers of inner truths -- to these stories... and these explanations make it easy to apply these true ideas in your own spiritual path. Here's a link to the first one: Exploring Genesis 12

We just finished the 4th Bible translation in our True Christian Bible series, Вистинска христијанска Библија, in Македонски. Next up for the Balkan languages, we are going to work on Serbian and Albanian translations. Here's a link to the Macedonian Bible: Вистинска христијанска Библија

We're rolling out Swedenborg Reader version 5. It's an app for Android and iOS phones and other devices, with versions for Windows and MacOS coming soon. It helps you read and search Swedenborg's theological works, with or without a mobile or internet connection - so it's especially useful for situations where you have slow or no internet service. And - this version is now a Bible AND Swedenborg Reader. It's all cross-referenced, searchable, multilingual, and fast. And free. Follow the links on our Swedenborg Reader page to download from the Play Store, the App Store, or the Windows Store.

We're really pleased to bring you the beginning of the first Korean translation of "Apocalypse Explained", a detailed exegesis of the Book of Revelation that Swedenborg wrote between 1757 and 1759, but left in manuscript. This translation is being done by Rev. Lee Soon Cheol (이순철) of the Korean New Church's Seoul congregation. So far, the translation covers the first 4 chapters of the Book of Revelation. Here's a link: 계시록 해설

We now have modern chapter summaries for the whole Book of Leviticus. They include a brief description of the literal story, and then a summary of the chapter's internal sense. To see the summaries... when you're reading the Bible, click the "Study" button, and the "Chapter Summary" link. That will get you to a 2-column view where you can see the chapter text, and the summary, side by side. Here's a link to Leviticus 1 with its summary.

These are explanations from Swedenborg's "Secrets of Heaven," covering the great Bible chapters about the 10 commandments, the Ark of the Covenant, the tabernacle, and the ephod and the breastplate. In Zulu. For the first time ever. Here's a link: Izimfihlakalo Zezulu

We just posted the rest of a brand new translation of the Old Testament in Macedonian. We haven't had a lot of content in Macedonian yet, and no Bible text -- so this is an important step. It's great for Macedonian readers to have access to a Bible text that's been translated with the intent to preserve the spiritual correspondences in the original Hebrew. Here's a link: Вистинска христијанска Библија

We now have around half of Arcana Coelestia translated into Hindi, by Rev. Peter Devassy, so we decided to get it up online where people can start reading and using it. We haven't made all the links to Bible verses and cross-references yet, but some of them are in there, and more are coming soon. It's a good early Christmas present for Hindi-speaking people who are Christians already, or interested to learn about the New Christian religion. Here's a link to it: आर्काना सेलेस्टिया

The human + machine translation system's really working. We didn't know what to expect for the Macedonian Bible, since Macedonian is only spoken by around 2 million people. That means that there's not THAT much written content to use for training AI models. But, our Macedonian-speaking translators have been pleasantly surprised! The machine does pretty well, translating from the Kempton Translation's English text into Macedonian. It learned quickly from their corrections, and they're moving through it rapidly. In two weeks, we have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy finished, and we're into Joshua already! Here's a link to what we have so far: Вистинска христијанска Библија

NCBS has undertaken the duty of housing and forwarding the SPI mission. "What are they talking about?," you ask.... Well, the late Dr. Erland Brock, a chemistry and earth sciences professor at Bryn Athyn College, saw a compelling need to translate Swedenborg's theological works into many languages. For 30 years, he spearheaded an effort to do that: Swedenborg Publishers International. The project was run by the Swedenborg Scientific Association (SSA) until this past summer, with NCBS collaborating pretty closely. Now, SSA has suggested that NCBS manage the current and future SPI work, given NCBS's strong emphasis on translation, and our new human+AI translation systems. We'll be working with the many of the same translators, in the same target languages -- and offering donors the chance to earmark donations to help pay translators for their work. Target languages right now include Czech, Macedonian, Albanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, French, Hindi, and Zulu. We're exploring others, too, so if you'd like to support a different one, let us know! We're asking this: If you would like to support New Christian translation work, this is one of the most efficient ways to do it. Donate to NCBS, noting that your donation is to be put towards SPI-related work, and we'll make sure that happens. If you would like to know more, please get in touch!

We just added chapter summaries for the rest of 1 Samuel, all of 2 Samuel, and all of 2 Kings. We have them now for all the chapters in the Word, which is pretty exciting. It's been a long term effort, and we're glad to be nearing the finish line. The explanations we have for Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy date from the mid-1800s, and they're pretty complex, so we're going to add modern ones for those books next, and maybe revisit Exodus, and then check it off our to do list.

So... we hoped back in the summer that our new Bible translation system would speed up the process of making "True Christian Bible" translations. And... apparently it does! This Montenegrin/Croatian translation was finished in less than 4 months. It took hard work by 3 people for 4 months, mind you, but still, this IS a game-changer. It's not BEYOND our wildest dreams, but... wow! Let's do a bunch more languages, dear readers. If you know English + another language, you can help.

Here's the link: Istinita Kršćanska Biblija

Back in August, we rolled out a new Bible translation system. Now it's November, and here's a new translation system for Swedenborg's theological works. It combines the best elements of human and machine translation. The translator effectively says, "ok, machine, translate these 5 passages from language 1 to language 2. Here are some guidelines (...). Go." The machine dutifully translates the text. The human translator reads the translated passages, and makes some edits. Then, "OK, now translate 5 more." The machine adds the human's corrections to its knowledge of how the job should be done, and translates those passages. The person makes edits to those results, and asks for some more passages. And so on... with the machine learning from the translator's edits as it goes along, and gradually getting better and better. The potential is huge!

In late July, we rolled out the first production version of our hybrid human+machine translation system for making new, accurate translations of the Word that carefully preserve the internal sense that's there in the Hebrew and Greek texts.

In August, we went looking for early adopters among our network of New Christian translators. One family team in Montenegro (in the Balkans) decided to give it a try. They were skeptical, but they liked the idea, and were keen to make New Christian translations for people in the Balkans, where in post-Communist countries there's a real thirst for spiritual ideas.

They've been super-productive, working mainly from the Kempton English translation, and targeting Montenegrin/Croatian as their first language. They've consulted many different translations in their work, and have made thousands of corrections to the machine translations, teaching the machine as they've gone along. In 3 short months, they've finished the Old Testament, and they're well along in Matthew. Here's a link to it: Istinita Kršćanska Biblija

It's a really exciting milestone for NCBS, and for the New Christian Church, and for the spread of true Christian religion in the Balkans.

In 1763, Swedenborg published four fairly short books that derived and laid out the key New Church teachings about the Lord, the Sacred Scripture, Faith, and Life. The original books were in Latin. Now they've all been translated into Swedish, too. We just put the most recent one, "Herrens lära", online. It's something of an experiment. We used all the things we know from the translations of the other three books, plus what OpenAI's models bring to the table, to make the translation. It needs to be reviewed and improved, but... it's pretty good. We're learning as we go, too, about how to leverage existing human translations to help the AI do better.

Swedenborg's great exegesis of Genesis and Exodus, "Arcana Coelestia", is typically printed in 12 volumes. To translate it from its original Latin into any modern language is a big undertaking. And yet... it happens. In our database, we currently have translations -- at least partial ones -- in 20 languages. Cristóvão Nobre's translation into Portuguese is one of these, and we just imported another substantial chunk of it -- so it's more than 1/3 complete now. If you want to understand the first 29 chapters of Genesis, well, now you can!

The Spanish translation of "Arcanos Celestiales" is coming along nicely, too. So far, it includes explanations of the inner meaning of first 10 chapters of Genesis. There's much more to follow, but already, Bible readers can get a good sense of the spiritual sense that's contained within the literal stories.

We're trying to provide chapter-level summaries for all the chapters in the Bible. And... we're getting closer to that goal line. We just posted summaries for the chapters in these books: Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Hosea, Zechariah, and Malachi. That rounds out the prophets.

These books all have the continuous inner meaning, or internal sense, which runs through the Bible, and makes it sacred. In the case of these prophetical books, the internal sense was sketched out in "The Inner Meaning of the Prophets and Psalms", a manuscript that Swedenborg wrote circa 1761.

To make these chapter summaries, we used AI tools to summarize the events in the literal text (which works pretty well), and then to extract and append the authoritative outline of the internal sense from this manuscript. We've also provided links to more detailed studies of these chapters wherever we have commentaries that are available.

Back in 1911, Leonhard Tafel's German Bible translation was published. Yesterday, we imported it into our main database. It's more of a milestone than we first realized: this may have been the first intentionally New Christian Bible translation that was ever done. Here's a link to it: Tafelbibel

We're assured by some of our German-speaking readers that it's still quite an accessible translation, and that it does a good job of preserving the inner meaning that's there in the original languages.

In today's chatbot update, we've added tooling that improves the bot's ability to supply helpful reference links, and explain the connections a little more fully. You might need to do a hard reload or clear browser cache if the reference buttons and "more..." links don't work the first time.

We just posted another volume of "Izimfihlakalo Zezulu", or Secrets of Heaven. This one, translated by a New Christian team in South Africa, describes the inner meaning of Exodus, chapters 13 to 21. Here is a link to it.

When you click on a highlighted Bible word, you can see a popup explanation of its internal meaning. You can click another button and get a word-map which shows you related Bible words. And now, instead of having to click around to see (and then forget) the various definitions, we give you a sidebar for easier reference.

We have teams starting to translate the Bible into Spanish and Montenegrin in a way that preserves the inner layers of meaning which are present in the Hebrew and Greek. Some of those deep meanings have been lost in modern attempts to simplify the text. We want to make readable texts that are still true to the originals, so... we made a system that facilitates that. The machine learns from translators' corrections, and gets better and better as you go along. We're planning to make these "Correspondences Bibles" in many languages. If you would like to help, get in touch!

We just posted an updated German translation of Arcana Coelestia, "Himmlische Geheimnisse". For our German-speaking Bible readers, this is going to be a big help. Many thanks to our friends in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland for their hard work in making this happen! Here's a link.

We just posted the New Century Edition team's translation of Volume 9 (of 15) of its "Secrets of Heaven" translation of Arcana Coelestia. We have it all linked-up and imported here, starting at #5867: Secrets of Heaven volume 9.

Here's a nifty new feature: If you're having the site read to you, now it will ask you at the end of a chapter, or text passage -- "Do you want to continue?" And you can answer "Yes" or "No", and it heed your request. It's multilingual. It's convenient. The voices are excellent. What's not to like?

Genesis summaries are coming thick and fast. We posted two last week, and now here are two more. Here's a link!

We had an outage on Sunday the 27th -- and we're sorry about the inconvenience it must have caused for our visitors - especially on a Sunday morning. Our hosting provider had a cooling system failure in their Newark, NJ data center, which caused a portion of that facility to be offline from around 6:30 AM EDT to 11:30 AM.

If you're logged in, and using the chatbot, you can save your chat histories (i.e. your research) and now... you can search your history for key words. It's a pretty useful new feature.

If you're logged in, you can take reading notes. We just added a function so you can select a section of text, hit the note button (or alt+N), and the note text and link get pasted into your notecard. Then... you can review all your notes, and export the ones you select into a word processor or spreadsheet.

When you're trying to read the Book of Revelation, a.k.a. "The Apocalypse", some explanation is welcome! If your most comfortable language is Dutch, well, here's a nice thing for you: We just imported and linked a new translation of "Apocalypse Explained" by Henk Weevers. It covers the first 9 chapters -- and more are coming soon. Here's a link!

For those of you who have been waiting patiently (champing at the bit?) for the next installment of Genesis commentaries by Brad Sheahan, wait no more. We just posted two new ones, for chapters 31 and 32. Find out how the story of Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Laban, and Esau has deeper symbolism that makes it something we can use in our lives, today, 4000 years later. Which is pretty amazing when you think about it, isn't it? Here's a link!

Here's a link to a new hub page for a nice library of resources that parents and teachers can use to "teach your children well". We've hosted these resources for years for one of our church partners. They're linked to Bible stories and verses, so they're ideal for preparing lessons for Sunday School or family devotions. We've pulled them together into a hub page to make it easier to find what you need. The "fraternal twin" hub page is on the General Church of the New Jerusalem's site, here.

We have links to a lot of old texts. That's a good thing. The Bible texts are really old, and people have been trying to understand them and translate them for a long, long time. Swedenborg's theological texts are a mere 250 years old, and were written in Latin -- a relative newcomer language. He saw many of his works through the printing and publishing process, but some were left in manuscript, and they've been largely inaccessible. But now, thanks to the Royal Swedish Academy of Science and the Heavenly Doctrine Publishing Foundation, we're pleased to provide a path to these texts, which form part of a UNESCO World Heritage collection. If you're logged in to our site, and are reading one of Swedenborg's Latin texts, you'll see a link to the manuscript's page. It's a beige icon with a quill pen. It's interesting to see these handwritten pages, and it's a terrific resource for translators. Here's an example.

There are around 5500 Bible words whose symbolic spiritual meanings are described. We have used AI tools to find words with similar or related spiritual meanings, and map them. Now, we can generate a word-map -- sort of a network diagram -- for any of these defined words. It's a great new way to explore the spiritual connections in the Bible. Here's an example.

We have started to add "collateral literature" to the chatbot's knowledge base. So far, we've added our libraries of spiritual topics and of Bible word explanations. They're getting their own sections in the chatbot's user interface, so as to keep them distinct. It's still a work in progress, but it looks like it's going to be useful. Here's a link.

Here's another nice tool that builds on the Strong's numbers... it's a searchable, sortable table that shows you how translators have expressed the Hebrew and Greek words in each Bible verse, in three translations - one each in English, French, and Spanish. And, here's a link to it.

James Strong was a 19th century American Methodist theologian who did the world's Bible readers a great service. He went through the Old and New Testaments, and assigned a number to each unique Hebrew and Greek word. Then he compiled a dictionary that defined the meanings of those words. We've made a nice online, searchable version of it, and it's on our Research Tools hub page now. And, here's a link to it. We hope you get good use from it; it's a very helpful tool.

If you use a MacBook or other Apple computer with MacOS, you can now install our "Swedenborg Reader" app on it. This follows our Windows Desktop release a few months ago, and of course the iOS and Android versions that have been out for a couple of years. This will be a very nice thing, especially for people who sometimes don't have good web connections. It's very multilingual, too! Here's a link. We hope you like it.

Our latest deployment of the chatbot is named "Coverdale" after Myles Coverdale who published the first complete English Bible in 1535. The Coverdale chatbot version is more widely read, and smarter, than its predecessors. It understands verbal questions, and can read its answers aloud. It highlights the most relevant excerpts in the text of sources. It's very good at linking to Bible verses and related explanatory passages. If you're logged in, it can remember your previous conversations and research. It's based on the latest ChatGPT 4.1 model.

Easter's a solemn, awesome, and joyful time. We have a bunch of related articles and stories featured for you, and of course the excellent commentaries by Ray and Star Silverman on the Four Gospels (which you'll find in the chapter summaries on the "Study" slider). What else? The New Christian chatbot's faster and smarter than it was just yesterday. The new Concordance pages are getting a good workout. And... the Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, and rose again, and that was THE inflection point for the human race.

For the chatbot, we've been running a bunch of mini-projects: making a better user interface, then improving and expanding the chatbot's "library", then improving its multi-lingual abilities, then upgrading its audio capabilities, and now... another round of making it think better. With a chatbot like this, you have agents and tools. It's a little bit like having a carpenter, who knows how to do things, and tools like hammers, saws, screwdrivers, or lathes, drill presses, and band saws. We're adding and refining tools now. That's going to help the chatbot be more helpful to you. Here's the link: New Christian Chatbot. Give it a try!

In the chatbot, AND across the whole site, we've just deployed a much-improved "read-aloud" feature. The voices are much more natural. If you have a free user account, and you're logged in, in "My Preferences", you can choose from a set of 11 voices, and you can set the voice speed that you prefer, too.

In the apostle John's "Book of Revelation", he is in the spirit, and has marvellous visions of things happening in the spiritual world. In `Revelation 19bbb6`, he writes: "And I saw heaven opened; and behold a white horse; and He who sits upon him is called Faithful and True; and in justice He judges and makes war." Why a white horse? What does it symbolize? Well... if you'd like to find out, and Hindi is your most comfortable language, we have a new translation of "The White Horse" for you, here.

We just deployed new speech-to-text and text-to-speech functions for the NC chatbot. You can dictate a question, and/or have the bot's reply read back to you. PS: You might need to clear your cache/browser history before you can see them. PPS: We had some chatbot downtime this morning while we were getting it deployed; apologies for that! PPPS: The reading voices aren't great; we're looking for a better-but-still-affordable tool to use for them.

One of the go-to references for New Christian scholars has long been the "Swedenborg Concordance", a massive 6 volume compilation of excerpts from Swedenborg's theological works on more than 9000 subjects, most of which are Bible words. It's very useful, but it's big, dense, and only in English. We've been working on this for a couple of years, and we finally have the text cleaned up, and the problems solved, and the links made, and it's online. We'd like to translate it, too, but that'll take some more doing. But at least now, it's available online to everyone, and you can search it, and follow links to sources.

Modern chatbots rely on AI large-language models. You can fine-tune them by creating special data that gets added to their main knowledge base. The New Christian chatbot is fine-tuned with Bible texts and on Swedenborg's theological works. These text get split into chunks that the LLM can embed as numerical vectors, and handle at high speed. We have developed a new, improved way to export, split, and embed the texts, and we started using it this week. Over the next few weeks, we'll finish this round of embedding. This process will help the chatbot give even better answers to your questions!

We added a new copy function to the chatbot UI. It makes it easy for you to copy your question, and the bot's answer, and the related source passages that you looked for. Plus it adds a basic citation footer for your convenience.

The NCBS site's speed is back up to a good level, courtesy of some clever detective and blocking work by our software team.

Over the past several days, we got surprised by a fast-rising wave of crawler traffic from three countries in Asia and South America. It took us a while to figure out how to block the unwanted traffic without blocking good traffic. In the meantime, the site's been slow, including the chatbot, to the point of being unusable at times -- and we apologize!

We got a new version of the New Christian chatbot deployed! It's smoother, faster, smarter, more multilingual, and better looking. It's definitely not perfect. We hope you'll use this latest version a lot. I hope you'll enjoy the good things it can do, and please tell us your ideas for how it can be improved. We have some batches of UI features and improved data sets that we'll be deploying soon, and at the rate AI's moving, there will be lots of other new exciting things we can harness, too, coming thick and fast.

Have fun! Here's the link: New Christian Chatbot

Another first in Hindi! Here's a new translation of Swedenborg's "Divine Love and Wisdom", thanks to Rev. Peter Devassy.

We are living out an ancient, ancient story. From the dawn of human memory, we have this belief that God created us, and loves us, and will save us if we let Him. From more than a thousand years before it happened, we have a promise -- that God will even come to earth, and be born among us, as our Messiah. It happened, in Bethlehem, in Judea, a little more than 2000 years ago. And we're living in our part of that same epic story, today.

We're on a roll in Hindi! Here's a new translation of Swedenborg's "Conjugial Love", thanks to Rev. Peter Devassy. We think it's the first translation of this work into Hindi.

Here's a brand new translation of Swedenborg's "Doctrine about Faith", from 1763, thanks to Rev. Peter Devassy. We think it's the first translation ever of this work into Hindi. And faith... yeah, we need that!

Many, many people have enjoyed Ray and Star Silverman's "Seamless Garment" commentary on the four gospels. If you've been following along, you'll have seen that - having gotten all the way through to the end of John's Gospel, they've realized that they need to go back and revise and infill some of their earlier "takes". We just posted their Matthew 16 update, which starts out with "Recognizing the Messiah". They say it's important. So, it probably is! Have a look!

A couple of weeks ago, one of our tech-guru friends asked if we could export the text of "Heaven and Hell" from our database and send it to him, so he could try something. So, we did. About 30 minutes later, he emailed back the link to this podcast-style discussion. It was fully generated using Google's new NotebookLM AI tool. NotebookLM had "read" the book, "understood it," and generated a podcast about it, hosted by two real-sounding "people." It's mind-boggling.

Here's a link to the discussion on Heaven and Hell: An AI discussion on HH

And here's another one on True Christian Religion: An AI discussion on TCR

We just deployed a major new version of the New Christian Chatbot. It uses some of the latest AI tools, and is getting pretty good at helping people find what they're looking for. It knows its Bible. One of the best new features is that (logged in) users can save their chats, and retrieve them later, so... your research doesn't just disappear! This is really nice; our testers have been using it a lot. Give it a try!

Today's the annual Thanksgiving holiday in America, so at least in this editor's neck of the woods, we're especially focused on being thankful. This isn't really news, but... just a note to say how grateful we are for the opportunity to work on this project, and for all the people who help with it in so many ways, and for the millions of people who come here to read God's Word, seek to understand it, and try, day after day, to apply it to their lives.

You've probably seen our news feed items about the work we've been doing with our friends at the Novi Jerusalem mission in the Balkans. As usual, they've been busy, now translating "Arcana Coelestia" into Macedonian. We just worked with them to process 5010 passages of it, explaining the inner meaning of Genesis up to chapter 39. Here's a link to НЕБЕСНИ ТАЈНИ.

As longtime readers will know, we've been adding chapter by chapter explanations for the four gospels, written by Ray and Star Silverman, for the past few years. They finished John's Gospel back in June 2024, and started to compile the explanations into book form. As they did that, they realized that their Matthew explanations needed to be improved. That's a useful lesson in itself: as we read and study the Word, we can hope to gain more insight into its deep wisdom. So... Team Silverman went back at it, and they've just supplied improved versions of their explanations of the first 15 chapters of Matthew's Gospel. You can start reading them here: Exploring the Meaning of Matthew 1.

We're pleased to post another brand new translation of "Heaven and Hell" - this time in Hindi. There are 615 million Hindi speakers in the world. It's a pretty safe bet that a lot of them, at some point in their lives, are going to speculate about whether there's life after death, and if so, what it's like. And... now they can read स्वर्ग और नरक and find out!

There are around 5000 Hebrew and Greek Bible words whose symbolic meanings are pretty well understood. For years, we've been carefully trying to spread the known examples across other occurrences of these words, and from English into languages that we don't know as well. There are lots of nuances involved, but we're gradually getting closer to full coverage. In the Bible text, we highlight the words we're reasonably confident about, and offer popup explanations. We've recently found that, with care, we can use AI to do a good job of finding known concepts in verses in most of the languages that we support. In the past several weeks, we've been able to add more than 16000 new terms - for Bible people, places, and tribes - in 24 languages. Next up: rippling all the other simple concepts.

Here's a brand new translation of "Divine Providence" in Hindi! It's been translated by Rev. Peter Devassy, and sponsored by Swedenborg Publishers International, a project of the Swedenborg Scientific Association.

There is a new version of the Swedenborg Reader app out for Android and iOS devices. It helps you read and search Swedenborg's theological works, with or without a mobile or internet connection. This new version includes search enhancements, upgraded read-aloud functions, and improved logic for handling reference links when there are several options.

Well, there is! And now there is a new version of the Swedenborg Reader app ready for your Windows computer. It's built from the same code base as our app for Android and iOS devices, with some compile-time tweaks. It's perfect for when you want to read and search Swedenborg's theological works from your laptop or desktop, but you have a slow or non-existent internet connection. Here's a link to the store and the free app.

We have two English translations of "Apocalypse Explained" - one by John Whitehead, and one by Isaiah Tansley. They are substantial works, with more than 14,000 scripture references. In print they fill 5 fat volumes. We've had them on the site for a long time, but they'd been scanned and marked up, and... they were messy. Now, thanks to steady slogging by some careful editors, we've gone all the way through them both, making many hundreds of corrections, and they're in pretty good shape! These "Apocalypse Explained" (or AE for short) translations are particularly useful to Bible readers because the work offers a very broad exegesis of Bible passages. Of the 14,514 Bible references, only around 2700 are to the Book of Revelation. The others draw from all the other books of the Word.

How about lots of "heavenly secrets" -- insights into the inner meaning of the Bible? We've just posted the first half of "Nebeske Tajne", a brand new Croatian translation (by Novi Jerusalem) of Swedenborg's "Arcana Coelestia", or "Secrets of Heaven", which was written between 1749 and 1757. Here's a link to Nebeske Tajne.

Here's another Spanish translation that we just received: "La Divina Providencia", courtesy of friends and colleagues from Brazil, Peru, and the USA. It's linked up and ready to be read: La Divina Providencia.

We just deployed a third Macedonian translation of one of Swedenborg's works: "Доктрина на животот за Новиот Ерусалем", or, in English, "Doctrine about Life for the New Jerusalem". Here's a link!

Today, we posted another brand new translation of "Doctrine about Faith". This one is in Montenegrin, and it's been produced by the energetic Novi Jerusalem mission there. Here's a link to it!

We just deployed a second translation of one of Swedenborg's works in Macedonian -- this time of his important short work, "Doctrine about Faith". Here's a link! There are more to come, in Macedonian, and in other languages of the Balkans.

We've had so many sub-projects on the go that it's sort of dizzying. There's a lot of useful news: a new version of our Reader App, a new version of the AI-driven New Christian Chatbot, more new translations of the Writings, finishing the main cleaning and editing of the Potts Concordance text, adding the final chapters of Ray and Star Silverman's explanations of the inner meaning of the Four Gospels, and new test results from human-in-the-loop machine translation -- all sorts of things. We've started to summarize the states of these projects on a projects page here!

18 editors have slogged through the whole of the Swedenborg Concordance, with its more than a quarter of a million references, fixing hundreds of thousands of scan/OCR errors. It's been a labor of many hundreds of hours, and despite some moments of despair, we finished the main edits to the last slice of it today! Huge thanks to our wonderful editors! Fran, Dale, Rebecca, Karen, Brad, Reinhold, Clark, Bill, Calvin, Bengt, Tom, Cathy, Reyana, Judy, Ian, Maynard, Byron, Lawson, the Kempton High School class, and... am I forgetting anyone?? Probably! It's been a big long-running project. What a team! One little vignette: I was apologizing to one guy who had just finished editing one of the longest slices, and he said, 'Don't be sorry; this was the perfect file for me! There was so much in there that I needed to know.' Read more about it here! And, if you would like to see an example of the cleaned text, here's one slice. Next, we'll do some mapping of old numbering to new, and then parse the text into our database, and then do lots of things with it that will be really useful for everyone!

Rev. Hyunjin Yang has started to translate "Arcana Coelestia", or "Secrets of Heaven", which explains the inner meaning of Genesis and Exodus. It's a great big work, and this is just a start -- but it's a good start! There are 249 paragraphs, explaining the first 2 and a half chapters of Genesis. Here's a link to it: 천국의 비밀.

We finished importing and hyperlinking Mr. Nagao's translation of Divine Providence, or "神の摂理についての天使的知恵の書".

Ray and Star Silverman have just finished their very fine and much-visited commentary on the gospels: "The Four Gospels: A Seamless Garment". We just posted the final chapter which explores the meaning of John 21. It's been a labor of love, and of many years, for them... and it's been an honor and pleasure for the New Christian Bible Study project to be the online publisher of the whole series. It's been an important part of our spiritual journey, too! A printed book is planned, so there will be more news to come.

We're excited to bring our readers another world first: An online translation of part of Swedenborg's work on Heaven and Hell, or "Lehodimo le Dihele" in Sesotho. This partial translation includes numbers 421-520, with more on the way soon.

There is a new version of the Swedenborg Reader app now available for Android and iOS devices. It helps you read and search Swedenborg's theological works, with or without a mobile or internet connection. What's the latest?

• New highlighting functionality - select text to highlight, then choose "Highlight" from the context menu to save your selection as a bookmark. Tap the highlighted text again to add a note.
• Improved "sharing" - previously, only an entire passage could be shared via various messaging and social apps, but now you have the option to select a specific sentence or chunk of text to share.
• More supported languages - new user interfaces added for Albanian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian
• Updated homepage - now with direct links to your Bookmarks and the NC Chatbot.

The New Century Edition team at the Swedenborg Foundation has just released Volume 7 (of 15) of its "Secrets of Heaven" translation of Arcana Coelestia. We have it all linked-up and imported here, starting at #4639: Secrets of Heaven volume 7

...you have a treat in store! AI is all the rage, of course, and it IS very cool, and it has a lot of potential for the work we're doing in NCBS. Our New Christian Chatbot uses the underlying knowledge base of ChatGPT, fine-tuned/governed by the texts of the Old and New Testaments and Swedenborg's Writings. It's multilingual, i.e. if you talk to it in French, it will answer you in French. One of the best things about it is that it will suggest a list of the most relevant sources, with links to them. It's not perfect, but it's pretty useful already, and getting better fast. The robot icon is shown on the main toolbar now, and it's right on the home page.

We've had some fairly basic Bible reading plans available for quite a while. We've added more features to them now, so they can include videos, pictures, more explanatory text, and the like. And, way back in 1992, Rev. Eric Carswell put together a book of selected passages from Swedenborg's works, into a "Swedenborg Sampler". He used it to lead small group dialogs, and found that it was pretty helpful for people from all walks of life, coming from various religious backgrounds. We had a copy of this... so we asked Eric if we could use it, and he said "sure", so we parsed it into our Reading Plan format, and it's now ready for action. Check our Reading Plans page to browse the available plans.

Here's an update on the Concordance cleaning project. Sixteen editors are ploughing through this big task. 16 of 58 slices are all done. 6 more are edited and ready to review. 16 more in process right now. Only 19 are still a mess. There's still time to get in on editing if you want to!

Hot off the presses... it's a new version of the Swedenborg Reader app for Android and iOS devices. It helps you read and search Swedenborg's theological works in 22 languages, with or without a mobile or internet connection. What's new in this release?

• Bookmarks: You can now easily create bookmarks to passages that you want to remember.
• Related passages: At the bottom of each page, you can see a list of passages that relate - somehow - to the one you're reading. Right now, these are mostly passages that are known parallels, or ones where whole chunks of text were copied from one work to another, by Swedenborg. We hope, too, to add contrasting ones, in the future.
• Inbound passages: If there are any passages that link to the one you're reading, you'll get a list of those, too.
• We've made some nice updates to navigation, too, and streamlined some search functions.

Hope you like it! You can get it free from Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store.

The Concordance cleaning project is coming along nicely. We finished X, Y, and Z first; they were fairly short, and good for a shakedown cruise. Now, we've finished A, too. B's been edited and is ready for review. All the C through E files are being actively edited. There are 12 volunteer editors up and running, and a few more will be coming on stream soon. There's still plenty of room for more, too! If you would like to help, get in touch.

We have just posted a brand new Swedish translation of "Läran om den heliga skriften" (Doctrine about the Sacred Scripture) from Rev. Göran Appelgren. This work is really important; it shows how the Bible, with its layers of meaning, still rests at the heart of a true understanding of... everything, really... and at the heart of a well-lived life here, and later in heaven. Here's a link to it: "Läran om den heliga skriften".

The popular commentary series by Ray and Star Silverman on the four gospels has three new installments, starting here: John 18.

The Bible is a big book, and it's densely packed with concepts, people, places, and stories. When Swedenborg was explaining the symbolism of these many Bible things, it took him a lot of books to do it. In the later years of the 1800s, there was a New Christian scholar, Rev. John F. Potts, who spent 27 years compiling a 6-volume concordance to Swedenborg's writings. It's been one of the go-to New Church research tools ever since, rather like Strong's Concordance is for the Bible. But... the printed volumes are big and unwieldy, and are only in English, and the great work of the Internet Archive in scanning it still resulted in giant, slow .pdf files. We decided to clean the scanned text. It's taken a long time -- more than a year. We're getting close to getting it to a useful state. We're recruiting volunteer proofreaders and editors now.

In the meantime, we've divvied up the massive .pdf files into 50 smaller ones, so they're a little easier to use for searching. Here's a link to the page where you can find them: Swedenborg Concordance Files.

And, coming soon, you'll be able to search the concordance text itself, and we'll be importing it into our main database so it can be even more useful.

We're pleased to bring you a new set of Chinese translations of some theological texts that Swedenborg wrote but didn't publish. Many are drafts or outlines for works that he subsequently did expand, polish, and publish. They were written in Latin, and these are the first translations of them into Chinese that we're aware of. Here's the list:

• The Inner Meaning of the Prophets and Psalms ( 先知书、诗篇和圣言历史部分的内义概览) - 该书是一本条理清晰的概述/学习指南，介绍了《旧约》中先知书和所有诗篇的内在含义。
• Coronis (真实的基督教附录) - 在这本《圣经》经文集中，瑞典堡提出了这样一个观点：旧的基督教会正在消亡，而一个基于对圣言更充分理解的新教会正在形成。
• Canons of the New Church (新教会圣典) - 在这份简短的草稿中，瑞典堡简要概述了新教会的神学体系--这是 1770 年出版的《真正的基督教宗教》的初步草图。
• Last Judgment (draft) (最后的审判(遗作)) - 这份手稿是已出版作品《关于最后审判的续篇》的草稿。
• About Charity (仁爱的教义) - 慈善的真正含义是什么？瑞典堡在这篇简短的文章中概述了这一主题。
• About Marriage (婚姻) - 这是瑞登堡在准备撰写《婚姻之爱》（英文标题通常为 "Conjugial Love "或 "Marriage Love"）时所做的早期大纲/草稿。
• True Christian Religion (Additions) (真实的基督教补录) - 1770 年出版《真正的基督教宗教》后，瑞典伯格起草了这些关于一些精神体验的描述，作为对主要作品的潜在补充。
• Summaries in the Exposition of the Apocalypse (启示录诠释概述) - 在这项研究中，瑞典堡总结了对《启示录》内在含义的章节级解释。
• The Way to a Knowledge of the Soul (通向灵魂知识的道路) - 这篇简短的论文似乎标志着作者从有关灵魂本质的初步研究到更彻底的方法的转变，这些方法在他的《灵魂领域的动力学》一书中达到了顶峰。
• A Specimen and Sketch of the Doctrine of the New Church (样本和草图) - 这是新基督教教义的简要概述。
• The Consummation of the Age (时代的完结) - 精神史追溯了 "教会"--人们的精神生活和世界观--的兴衰。本纲要草案描述了第一个基督教会的精神衰落和新基督教时代的开始。
• Precepts of the Ten Commandments (十诫) - 瑞典堡以 "十诫 "为基础，写下了这篇文章，作为 "生命学说 "的草稿。

We've just released a new version of the Swedenborg Reader app for Android and iOS devices. The Swedenborg Reader app allows you to read and search the theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg in 22 languages, with or without a mobile or internet connection. What's new in this release?

• We've added tables of contents for each translation to support easy navigation between chapters.
• The app now saves your furthest passage read for each translation so you can quickly continue where you left off.
• When using the read-aloud feature, the app will continue audio playback when you minimize or switch to another app so you can listen while driving or doing other tasks on your device.

Get it from Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store.