HR!Day864 - Tue 2/27/24 Emanuel Swedenborg: Nature Mystic
Day 864 Tue 2/27/24 Emanuel Swedenborg: Nature Mystic
- --- Humanity Rising Day 864 - Tuesday February 27, 2024 (GoTo Bottom)
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Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), 18th century Scandinavian scientist-turned-mystic, is perhaps best known for his later influence on Romantic artists and writers such as William Blake and Ralph Waldo Emerson. This talk explores the legacy of one of his core theological ideas: that all of nature, even the whole cosmos, consisted of correspondences between the natural world and the spiritual. For Swedenborg, the sacred scriptures weren’t the only way that Divinity could communicate with humans—correspondences turned everything in nature into a sort of spiritual language, where rocks, rivers, hills, trees, and all living things—including our human bodies--came to glow with spiritual significance. Our conversation covers how this idea was read by later environmentalists, such as John Muir, as well as by the pioneering disability activist, Helen Keller. In our modern 21st century moment—shaken as we are by various climate crises, and ongoing injustices to the marginalized—Swedenborg’s correspondences might allow us to live in a more numinous (and equitable) world.
Dr. Devin Zuber, MA, MPhil is Associate Professor for American Studies, Religion, & Literature at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, and the George F. Dole Professor of Swedenborgian Studies. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Dr. Zuber taught at universities in Germany and New York, and has been a fellow or visiting professor at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library (London), Stockholm University’s Department for Aesthetics and Culture, and at the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment (LMU Munich). He has published widely on the intersection of spirituality with contemporary art, including recent essays in Marina Abramović: the Spirit Under any Condition Does Not Burn (Royal Academy of Art, 2023). His last book on environmental imagination, A Language of Things, received the Borsch Rast Book Prize in 2022.
Dr. Rebecca Esterson is Dean of the Center for Swedenborgian Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, where she also holds the Dorothea Harvey Professorship in Swedenborgian Studies. She earned her PhD from the Graduate Division of Religious Studies at Boston University. She earned her Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School with a focus in world religions, and also studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a visiting graduate student. After receiving her master’s degree, she worked at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions for 9 years where she was able to further develop her interest in comparative studies and interfaith learning. Her teaching and research interests include: the history of biblical interpretation, hermeneutics, Jewish and Christian mysticism, Jewish-Christian relations, eighteenth century intellectual culture, Christian Hebraism, and comparative religious studies. Her recent book, Jewish Allegory in Eighteenth-Century Christian Imagination, was published by SBL Press in 2023.
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