by Anders Hallengren
The New Church minister Christopher Hasler returns to Czechoslovakia after 43 years exile to ordain his compatriot Samuel Marˇik into the priesthood.The years of threats, persecution, forced secrecy were followed by a sudden and unexpected freedom when the communist power was broken in the autumn of 1989 in Czechoslovakia, along with other East European countries. During the moving ceremony, when the pastor could for the first time be officially recognized, the ordaining minister felt that perhaps that day in Eastern Moravia he repaid something to the Czech nation where he first learned of Swedenborg before the war. This time revolution meant revival.
by William Ross Woofenden
Chapter V: Toward a solution of the mind/body problemIn Chapter II, in the section tracing the development of the doctrine of influx, considerable attention was given to the subtle changes in the concept of the soul which are discernible in the scientific and philosophic works of Swedenborg, as well as the concomitant modifications in his ideas of the mechanics of the commerce of soul and body. It would be both unnecessary and tedious to rehearse here all the details given there, except that it may be useful to reiterate that our author moved completely away from his early positive stance toward a theory of physical influx, first to a tentative approval of the concept of two-way interactionism, but then to a general thesis that spiritual influx, or so-called one-way interactionism—from soul to body only—seemed the most plausible.
