Marketing the Writings

What would you do for the church with an unlimited budget? Coleman explores the possibilities for a massive, nation-wide advertising blitz.

Here's my vision: we make it our goal that over half of Americans know the name of Swedenborg and have some idea of who he was. How could we do this? I'm not sure. I know very little about marketing books. I haven't seen many television commercials or billboards for books. Advertising in magazines and newspapers seems to be a better avenue. Still, if we're operating with limitless funds, I think we could venture into billboards and TV commercials. We could arrange for translators to do book tours. I'm sure the Swedenborg Foundation does some of this already, but with more money it could expand to larger, more public places to advertise – the New York Times, Time magazine, billboards on I-95, a TV commercial at the Super Bowl.

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Editor's Box | Coveting: Some Thoughts Influenced By and Very Loosely Related to the Articles Posted So Far on New Church Perspective

The Lord tells us in the Ten Commandments that we should not covet. In fact, the two last commandments are about not coveting: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife; you shall not covet your neighbor’s house, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exodus 20:17, NKJV)—that’s 20% of the commandments!

It’s not surprising then, that I find myself coveting a large part of the time. Mostly I covet other people’s lives; I could go into details, but really it just boils down to me thinking other people’s lives are better than mine—like somehow I got short-changed in life while everybody else got paid in full. Sound familiar?

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Buddhism and the New Church

Ian gives a brief but insightful comparison between Buddhist and New Church ideas. For a consideration of what to make of differences in religion turn to Isaac's article Even as We are One.

All true religion is founded on the idea that love is the heart of human life. Both the New Church and Buddhism hold religious visions in which humanity's higher reality is one of love. More interesting are the perspectives Swedenborgians and Buddhists share on why, if love is our highest reality, we do not feel love all the time—or even at all. They also share common themes on how we can become a part of this higher reality. Buddhist teachings stress the idea of non-attachment to our desires; whether they are for material possessions, physical pleasures, thoughts or emotional states. The teaching of non-attachment is compared easily to Swedenborg's view of love of self and of the world: love of self being an obsession and preoccupation with our self and our desires and love of the world being an imbalanced craving for possessions, wealth and pleasure. It is our attachments to these things that lead us into the negative states we feel during our life.

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Spiritual Body Image

Taryn and Pearse explore the idea of people created in the image and likeness of God. In a certain way, everything in creation reflects the human form from the Divine but how are people distinct from the rest of creation? Malcolm continues to look at issues of body image, though his focus is on clothing.

We humans place a lot of importance in appearances, especially our own, often glancing at a mirror several times every day. But most of us are aware of a part of a person beyond that assemblage of cells. People have inklings of another reality apart from bodies made of flesh and bone. Someone can be “beautiful on the inside,” while another can be “inhumane” and even “bestial.” On this earth, these are just turns of phrase.

Meandering through a zoo, no one should have trouble telling the human visitors from the animal inhabitants. One only has to look at the forms of the people and compare them to those of tigers or elephants. People look human. But we are not human merely because of our outward appearance.

According to the Word, the Lord modelled the human race after Himself.

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Are You Happy?

Ronald explores how to actually be happy. States of desolation may have to come but they still aren't any fun. How can we work towards real happiness? How can we ask the Lord to experience joy along the journey?

Are you happy? I mean actually happy? Many of us are not happy and at times there is no apparent cause. For whatever reason, walking the spiritual path can be difficult and at the end of a day we may find ourselves wondering why we endeavored to walk such a path in the first place. Maybe it’s just a flash of a moment, but many of us in a moment of desperation wonder if satisfaction lies in other places. It happens to even the best of us.

At times we may feel tempted to be bitter or maybe we are bitter. This state can be compared to a barren wasteland where nothing is growing.

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Meaning-making and the Power of Writing

This essay originally appeared as the first chapter of Chelsea Rose Odhner's undergraduate thesis entitled, “Write to Heal: An Analysis of Writing Therapy in the Treatment of Gynecological Cancer,”; completed in 2008. Chapter One, included here, dissects the elements in the process of writing and contrasts these with the process involved in other forms of communication. -editor.

Among all forms of language, the written word has particular power. With respect to the styles of writing in the Word, Emanuel Swedenborg (2007) explains that the people of the earliest church “expressed themselves in words representing higher things [and that] they also spun those words into a kind of narrative thread to lend them greater life” (§ 66). Spinning the words into a kind of narrative thread gave the people “the fullest pleasure possible.” It is unclear whether Swedenborg’s use of the term “earliest church” here refers to a time during the earliest church that had the written word or not. In either case, the key point is that the narratives involved a composing process whether written or otherwise. If it is true in general that some greater life can be imparted to language by being woven into a narrative thread, how could writing serve as an optimal medium for this process? By investigating qualities unique to writing as a form of language we may be able to develop an understanding of how language could acquire greater life by being woven through writing. Does language acquire greater life by being written because the process of writing serves as a medium for making meaning?

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