Earth Day

Earth Day and Swedenborg

This “Earth Day” week is a good time to honor some of the people who have worked to improve our environment – and have been influenced by Swedenborg in doing so.
 
Dr. Devin Zuber, Associate Professor at the Center for Swedenborgian Studies, an affiliate of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) at Berkeley, California, wrote in the April 2013 Messenger that he started his doctoral dissertation with the question:
 

“How was it that several of the writers who were seen as foundational for American environmentalism – such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir – were also readers to one degree of another of Swedenborg?”  He then said:  “I was particularly intrigued by what seemed to be echoes and traces between their absorption of Swedenborg’s theology of correspondence and their various projects to spiritualize natural experience outdoors:  to turn the mountains into ‘sermons written in stone,’ in John Muir’s memorable phrasing, and locate spiritual truths in an aesthetic encounter with wilderness, almost as if nature were a divinely written text that had to be described and decoded.”

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