Editor's Box | Digest: First Ten Articles in 2010

January 1 through March 5. Catch up on any of the articles you've missed! Ranging from Buddhism to Body Image, our authors share thoughts on a wide variety of topics.

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Enlightenment: Ilustrado vs. Liviano

With an acknowledged "unpolished style," Heath Synnestvedt playfully considers a range of topics. Violence on television, the human propensity to distraction and understanding the concept of enlightenment are all explored through anecdote and irony. In keeping with his message and manner, Heath intends the use of the lower case "i" for the personal pronoun. -Editor

Reading in this publication, New Church Perspective, i am struck by the unpolished nature of the majority of my own written work. The article that follows received a few taps from a ball-peen hammer, but not much.

Under “Ilustrado” on Wikipedia there's a definition of the adjective “ilustrado”: “Spanish for ‘erudite,’ ‘learned,’ or ‘enlightened ones’.” (There's also an interesting historical anecdote which you may wish to read instead.)

For my part, i prefer to employ the word “enlightened” in the sense of the word “light” as it relates to mass, rather than rays or particles. (I first heard this use of the word in a seminar run by Landmark Education)

If you look up “liviano” in a Spanish-English dictionary the primary usage is “light” (weight) as contrasted with “heavy”. Similarly as in English, this adjective can describe things that are frivolous. It can go even further and be applied to the lewdness of a comedian. Upon discovering this usage as i sat here in a cybercafe i nearly removed the word “liviano” from the title of my article with the desire to morph the piece into something acceptably familiar to my imagined audience.

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Dating “Outside” the Church

In this article Garrett Smith explores his changing attitude toward dating "outside" of the New Church. Like Meryl Cowley a couple weeks ago in Spirituality in Relationships, Garrett concludes that spanning differences of religious background with romantic interest offers some unique benefits as well as challenges. - Editor

So… who am I, and what does dating “outside” the church mean? First, a little background:

I grew up in about as New Church a family as they come. As a preacher’s kid, I had the privilege of living the gypsy-esque lifestyle that is normal for any preacher’s family—in our case moving from Mitchellville, MD to Westville, South Africa before finally ending up in Kempton, PA. Through these moves, the New Church was always strong focus in our day-to-day life and I remember that our family had worship most weeknights at home and went to church pretty much every Sunday. (Religiously you might even say.)

For schooling, all three of my older brothers ended up going to “normal”, public schools—although they might disagree with calling the uniformed, British, all-boys, public high school that they went to, “normal”. I on the other hand managed to skip public school all together. Through careful planning started as a 5-year-old, I managed to go from Washington New Church School to Kainon New Church School to Kempton New Church School to The Academy of the New Church finally ending up at Bryn Athyn College of the New Church for freshman and sophomore year of college. (You may notice a common suffix to all of these school titles.)

With religion classes standard in the curriculums of all of the above, I mention my schooling only as a preface to illustrate the pervasiveness of New Church teachings that I was exposed to by the end of sophomore year in college. The specific doctrine relevant to this particular story is that by this stage I was very familiar with was: you should not marry outside of the church. The very reasonable reason for this being that having the same religion is the most important criteria to be sure of when getting married. This being the case, it’s probably best to not even date outside of the church.

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The Hidden Influence and Relevance of Swedenborg 3: Swedenborg's Influence

This is the third of three sections of an essay by Curtis Childs on the significance of Emanuel Swedenborg's work. Start with Section 1: Why We Are Here. Then read Section 2: Egypt, Assyria, and Quantum Mechanics.  Then finish up here with: Swedenborg's Influence. - Editor.

Swedenborg's Influence

Let me explain why Swedenborg merits scrutiny. It is a fact that the greatest poets and prose writers have borrowed liberally from him. The list is long: first Blake, as his direct spiritual descendant; then Goethe, a fervent reader of Swedenborg (as was Kant followed by Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Balzac, Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Emerson, Dostoevsky.... (
Czeslaw Milosz, 1980 Nobel Prize, Literature, Swedenborg.ca)

The task of compiling a list of the people and institutions affected by Swedenborg becomes a decision about who and which to include. His influence has been massive. While discussion of his scientific achievements would merit its own article, for brevity this section will focus only on the impact of his theological works, necessarily robbing him of credit for the achievements of the first fifty-six years of his life.

Hellen Keller, perhaps best known for her activism on behalf of the handicapped and for other causes, was greatly affected by Swedenborg’s writings. Struck in early childhood by an illness that left her deaf, blind, and dumb, somehow she was able, through the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan, to overcome and become a prolific writer, speaker, and activist. Swedenborg’s works entered her life during her teenage years, when she was first given a copy of Heaven and Hell. This had a huge impact on her, and it showed up in her writing, throughout her life: “Swedenborg’s books have lifted my wistful longing for a fuller sense-life into a vivid consciousness of the complete being within me… yes, the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg have been my light and a staff in my hand, and by his vision splendid I am attended on my way” (34).

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Spirituality in Relationships

Meryl and her husband Diogo both come from deeply spiritual backgrounds but the shared elements of spirituality between were not necessarily what she expected while growing up. In this article Meryl explores her evolving understanding of what it means to have spiritual alignment with another person. -Editor

What does it mean to share a spiritual vision with your partner? As a person raised in the New Church, I grew up hearing about conjugial love and the importance of finding somebody who shares your beliefs. As a child, this meant to me that New Church people would naturally marry other people in the New Church, since they shared this special connection to Swedenborg and his wonderful teachings. I remember once overhearing my parents talking about a woman that we knew who was struggling in her marriage. I asked what they were talking about, and they said that it was a great source of sadness to this individual that her husband showed no interest in the New Church, and did not want to come to church services with her. I found this hard to believe. “How could you fall in love with someone who didn't like the same things you like?” I asked them. They smiled a knowing smile and told me that it happens to lots of people. That stuck with me for a long time. I was determined that I wouldn't end up like that woman, but how could I be sure? What did it really mean to be spiritually aligned with your partner?

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The Hidden Influence and Relevance of Swedenborg 2: Egypt, Assyria, and Quantum Mechanics

This is the second of three sections of an essay by Curtis Childs on the significance of Emanuel Swedenborg's work. Start with Section 1: Why We Are Here. Finally, turn to Section 3: Swedenborg's Influence. - Editor.

Perhaps one of Swedenborg’s most striking revisions of Christian thought centers around what is today called the Holy Bible. While Jesus Christ’s use of parables to teach is well documented in the New Testament, Swedenborg lays out, especially in his multi-volume work Secrets of Heaven, an extremely thorough, systematic, and extensive exegesis illustrating the belief that the entire Bible is, in fact, an allegory. Swedenborg’s interpretation relies on “correspondences,” the idea that the places, characters, and even the words appearing in Biblical text simultaneously represent aspects of God, humanity’s relationship to the divine, and a map of each of our personal spiritual journeys. The actual concept, though consistent, is quite complex, as one scholar studying Swedenborg’s Secrets of Heaven noted, “unfortunately, any straightforward definition of correspondence fails to capture the incredible richness of the Swedenborgian concept” (Woofenden 47).

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