A collection of Swedenborg's most striking insights about life in heaven, with vivid descriptions of angels' homes, their language, their communities, and even their romantic relationships ... The introduction by Grant Schnarr gives readers a modern framework for understanding Swedenborg's compelling vision of the spiritual world. -- from back cover.

"Two short works, which Emanuel Swedenborg originally published separately, containing his teachings on religious faith and its connection with the way one lives. In "Life," Swedenborg focuses on regeneration (the conscious process of spiritual rebirth) and interprets the Ten Commandments in light of people's choices between good and evil. In "Faith," he rejects the notion of faith without rational sense, and he emphasizes that true faith can occur only in tandem with love and kindness for others"--

Available for the first time in paperback, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's eminently readable translation of Ernst Benz' classic work of scholarship stands as one of the most comprehensive biographies of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772).

The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love is a book by Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish theologist, scientist, thinker and mystic, here providing a thorough spiritual understanding of marriage love and sex. Excerpt: "Spiritual cold in marriages is a disunion of souls and a disjunction of minds, whence come indifference, discord, contempt, disdain, and aversion; from which, in several cases, at length comes separation as to bed, chamber, and house. That these effects take place with married partners, while their primitive love is on the decline, and becomes cold, is too well known to need any comment. The reason is, because conjugial cold above all others resides in human minds; for the essential conjugial principle is inscribed on the soul, to the end that a soul may be propagated from a soul, and the soul of the father into the offspring. Hence it is that this cold originates there, and successively goes downward into the principles thence derived, and infects them; and thus changes the joys and delights of the primitive love into what is sad and undelightful."

Swedenborg offers a beautiful, sensible, and believable picture of life after death. First, life does continue after physical death'in fact, our existence never ends. Swedenborg shows that heaven and hell are not places so much as states of being. And we learn that God does not send anyone to either heaven or hell, but that we live in complete freedom to choose and create the life we want to have.

Building on the eighteenth-century fascination with the possibility of life on other worlds and with traveler's tales of other cultures, this work describes life on other planets in our solar system and elsewhere in the universe. Swedenborg undertook this work specifically to demonstrate that Jesus is God not just of planet Earth but also of the universe as a whole.