We’re excited to announce four new arrivals from the Swedenborg Society in our bookstore!
Imaginal Landscapes: Reflections on the Mystical Visions of Jorge Luis Borges and Emanuel Swedenborg explores Swedenborg’s influence on Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, and in particular Borges’s preoccupation with parallel existences, the infinite, and the mystery of language. Borges was also fascinated by Swedenborg’s detailed descriptions of the spiritual world, and the landscapes found in Borges’s stories are strongly evocative of Swedenborg’s accounts. Author William Rowlandson is a leading British scholar on Borges, and this short work is an important addition to our understanding of Borges’s vision and creative process.
Renowned Mexican poet and environmental activist Homero Aridjis is fascinated by Swedenborg, in particular his depiction of angels. This influence is vividly felt in An Angel Speaks: Selected Poems. The seventeen poems in this collection, rendered in Spanish with a facing-page English translation, serve as an introduction to Aridjis’s immense body of work and his moving vision of life, death, and the spaces between. The volume features an introduction by Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. G. Le Clézio.
Distant Voices: Sketches of a Swedenborgian World View by John S. Haller, Jr. brings together a diverse chorus of nineteenth-century thinkers and demonstrates the many ways in which Swedenborg influenced them. Launching from a discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson and transcendentalism, the book takes the reader on a journey through utopian communities, spiritualism, homeopathy, and the far-reaching effects of the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893—which, among other things, led to leading Zen author D. T. Suzuki’s introduction to Swedenborg’s thought. For more from the same author, see The History of New Thought and Swedenborg, Mesmer, and the Mind-Body Connection, both available from our bookstore.
Utopian thinking is the theme of New Jerusalem: The Good City and the Good Society by Ken Worpole. Many authors (including John S. Haller, Jr., above) have noted Swedenborg’s influence on the design of nineteenth-century utopian communities, but Worpole brings the idea of visionary thinking and utopian design forward to modern times, exploring how a focus on living together harmoniously can bring added relevance to architecture and city planning.
Want more? Visit the Swedenborg Society page in our bookstore!