The Big Idea: Hundreds of millions of people read the Bible online, looking for truth, meaning, and help. We are working to make the world's most truthful, meaningful, helpful Bible Study site.
Our project team is building a site that helps you go to the Lord's Word in a comfortable language, and - while you're there - get insights into its real inner meaning. Then, you can get ideas about how to use those insights to live a better life.
Here are some of the key pieces:
1. A nice, clean, friendly user interface, in 26 languages so far.
2. The Word, in 80+ translations, in 40+ languages so far. You can compare translations side by side, lookup the Hebrew and Greek text, and see related passages, articles, stories, and videos.
3. Swedenborg's theological works, including his masterful Bible exegesis (now up to 570 translations in 27 languages, plus 56 original texts in Latin)
4. Explanations. We offer 23,000+ explanations of Bible chapters, stories, words, and spiritual concepts - with something for everyone!
5. The New Christian Chatbot. We harness the power of AI, and join it to the content of our big database of Bible texts, Swedenborg's theological works, and related articles -- and we bring you a chatbot that gives you good answers to tough questions, and a list of linked sources. We just launched the third-generation chatbot; it's getting really good!
6. The Swedenborg Reader app. People want to be able to read and search on their phones. So... we made an app for that, for Android and iOS. And now, for Windows and MacOS, too. It's really good, too, and it keeps getting better. Fast.
7. The Swedenborg Concordance, with some 9500 main entries, has been cleaned, linked, and imported. It took a huge, crowd-sourced effort, and it's a powerful tool. It gives readers a great way to see a concentrated set of text excerpts, with links, that link to thousands of Bible words and theological concepts and terms.
8. A unified clearinghouse/toolkit. We have brought together many of the pieces of the eco-system of New Christian thought -- the texts, media, research tools, classes, church branches and congregations, publishers, writers, translators, artists, musicians, and more. It's a place where people from all over can learn, and contribute their own talents, to make a vibrant hub.
For a more detailed look at these and other ongoing projects, see our Projects and Initiatives page.
Is this working? Yes! We had more than 11 million visits in the latest month, from all over the world. More and more, we're seeing people get engaged. They tell us how this project has helped them. They ask good questions. They're volunteering to help, too, and it's really heartwarming to see the love and talent and insight that people bring to the table.
We're happy with the results we're seeing, AND we still have many things that we need to do.
Here's what we're hoping to do next:
- We are making New Christian translations of the Bible - modern but accurate ones - in the major languages of the world. In these translations, we will try our best to preserve the correspondences that are in the text -- so that readers can really connect with the internal sense of God's Word. We deployed a human-in-the-loop AI-assisted Bible translation system in the summer of 2025. The Kempton Translation, the General Conference's Pentateuch translation, and the 1911 German Tafelbibel are the three New Christian translations that pre-date this system. We have them in our current collection, and they are serving as models/sources for ones in other languages. The really exciting news in late 2025 is that the first translation made using this new system is almost finished! It's in Montenegrin/Croatian, and it's online now, with just the Book of Revelation still to go. Other new ones are coming too -- in Spanish, Chinese, and Portuguese -- and more are about to start, in French, Dutch, and Japanese.
- We are modifying our successful Bible translation system so that it will help people translate the Writings better and faster, too. We want, at least, to have translations of Swedenborg's 18 published theological works in 30 languages. We still have around 250 gaps to fill, as we work through it. The new system makes this goal more achievable. Why? Well, let's take the translation of "Arcana Coelestia" into Japanese as a case in point. Mr. Nagashima translated the first 7050 passages (out of 10837), from Latin into Japanese. The new system learns Mr. Nagashima's translation rules and style from those first 7050 passage translations, and applies them to the remaining ones. Then, Mr. Nagashima's daughter, a skilled translator in her own right, can edit them, and it will learn from her edits, too, and apply those forward. It makes it much faster for her, and helps her maintain consistency throughout.
- Our Bible Chapter summaries project is coming along nicely. We have coverage now for the whole New Testament, and for the Prophets, Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, and Psalms. We just finished 1 Kings, too, and we're working on 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Samuel. We have some in-depth but older summaries for Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, too, that we'd like to update. Be sure to check these summaries out when you're reading; they can be very helpful!
- We want to make the meanings of Bible symbolism clearer. The Bible was written using correspondences -- where literal stories contain deeper spiritual meanings. We can readily see this in many parables, but in other places, it's harder to discern. We just finished another phase of this work, taking all the words for people, places, and tribes in the Word, and finding the matching words in each language, highlighting them in the text, and explaining their symbolic meanings. We've found that AI is really good at matching conceptually, so we can readily find the text for, say, Abraham, in all the languages we support. If you ripple that across thousands of words, in thousands of verses, in scores of translations, it's VERY useful.
- We have exciting translation projects going in Japanese, Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, Czech, and many other languages! We work closely with the translators to get the texts clean and cross-linked, and get them online. We inherited the Swedenborg Publishers International portfolio this year, so instead of just receiving, processing, and linking translation texts, we're now working even more closely with translators. These projects are still largely using traditional translation methods, but just about everyone is starting to experiment with AI assistance. We think our imminent Writings translation system will be a big help, and we'll get great input/feedback/testing from these experienced translators. Here's a special plea for donations, too: Many of these translators are working on a shoestring budget, and if we're now needing to support translation work, we need to raise money for that, too. There are pressing needs for funds for translation into French, the Balkan languages, Czech, Hindi, and Malayalam. These are the languages used in some places where the New Christian church has small footholds, and it's a blessing that we have people with the love for the New Christian doctrines, and the skills to produce the texts we need.
- There's much more, too. We're working hard on many fronts to help people encounter and engage with the true ideas and good loves of the New Christianity.
We have a small team of contract software developers who a lot of the core work, and volunteers who help with writing, editing, coding, audio content, video content, art selection, text markup and importing, scanning -- many things! We've also had great help from student workers; it's been a real team effort. We would love to be in a position to hire more people -- especially programmers, but also contract help from college students. There's a tremendous amount of talent in New Church circles, and it's a win/win if we can tap into it, and help young people on their career (and spiritual) paths at the same time.
We are very grateful to the many generous donors who have financially supported the project. With almost no endowment, it's been... interesting... at times, but it's working, and people have been impressed with what we've been able to accomplish so far.
If you like what we've done, and where we're headed, please consider making a donation.
