CURRENT COURSES
Spring 2025 Courses at the Center for Swedenborgian Studies
SWEDENBORG’S DIVINE PROVIDENCE (HRST-4800)
(02/03/2025-05/23/2025)
Instructor: Devin Zuber
Course Description:
This course offers a sustained, slow-reading of a central work in Swedenborg’s theological canon: his *Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Providence* (1764). Different in flavor from his other writings, this work (along with its twin, *Divine Love & Wisdom*) originally aimed at the educated so-called “natural philosophers” of Swedenborg’s day. We will explore how the eighteenth century problems and questions that the book raises—from the existence of evil and suffering, to the creation of the cosmos—can translate into our 21st century moment. In addition to exploring some prior theodicies which influenced Swedenborg (John Milton’s *Paradise Lost*, Leibniz), we will read other contemporaneous works parallel to Swedenborg’s, including Voltaire’s *Candide*, the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and what is widely regarded as one of the first modern English novels—Samuel Richardson’s *Pamela* (1740).
SWEDENBORGIAN BIBLICAL EXEGCS (BSST-2741)
(02/03/2025-05/23/2025)
Instructor: Rebecca Esterson
Course Description:
This course will locate Swedenborgian exegesis in the history of biblical interpretation, and consider how it relates to other spiritual sense traditions from biblical religions. Swedenborg’s famous doctrine of correspondences will be explored first in the context of dream interpretation and the interpretation of the natural world, two realms that occupied Swedenborg himself before he turned his methods to the interpretation of the Bible. This “universal rhyming scheme,” as one scholar put it, will then be applied to biblical themes and images, from Genesis to Revelation. Aside from close readings of biblical texts, course material will include Swedenborgian scholarship and homiletical material and non-Swedenborgian interpretation theory. Fundamental interpretive principles will be identified, which give meaning to biblical texts and to human spiritual flourishing. Students will develop an exegetical methodology that blends Swedenborgian tradition and personal intuition, for scholarly, pastoral and homiletical purposes. Assignments will include presentations and a final paper. [Auditors with faculty permission]