Stephen Larsen PhD and Robin Larsen PhD Discuss Theologian Swedenborg on On-Line with Andrea Jan 26

Jan. 26, 2011 - PRLog -- Stone Mountain Center, New Paltz, NY
Media contact:   WJ Carrel


New York, NY - Stephen Larsen, PhD, award-winning author and Psychology Professor Emeritus from SUNY Ulster, New York, and Robin Larsen, PhD, an author and art historian, will be interviewed on the Online with Andrea Internet radio program on Blog Talk Radio at blogtalkradio.com/onlinewithandrea, Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 4:30 pm PT, and 7:30 pm ET, for two hours, about the life and influence of Swedish nobleman Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th century scientist and theologian.  The program commemorates the January 29 birth date of Swedenborg. The live radio show call in number is (347)426-3895.  The program can also be accessed through the onlinewithandrea.com web site.

“Swedenborg was a great writer and published 50 volumes of philosophy, these volumes influenced American and Europeans for more than two centuries” comments Stephen Larsen.

“My father discovered the writings of Swedenborg when experiencing a life crisis.  He was transformed and became a Swedenborgian minister,” continues Larsen.  “Swedenborg’s work, now underappreciated in western culture and letters, was, in the 18th and 19th centuries, influential.   Swedenborg, in response to fundamentalist thinking of his time, wrote we must not wait for an historical event outside ourselves to determine our course, but we should try to examine the quality of our own lives and find the deep symbolic resonances within. He felt heaven is not a place you go to at the end of your life, but rather a spiritual condition available to all.  He also wrote that if you consider the needs of others as important as your own, you can experience an intelligible symbolic revelation.

“His influence on the arts, theatre, painting, and poetry was huge – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Balzac, Beaudelaire, Strindberg, Yeats, the visionary Hudson Valley school of painting, New England transcendentalism (Henry James senior, Emerson, Thoreau), the Utopian movement, and the Underground railway.   His philosophy was pivotal in the emancipation movement and the suffrage movement - he wrote that Africans were the most spiritual people on earth and that a woman was every bit as good as a man.  Legislators paid heed and they drew reference to Swedenborg’s wise redactions which gave a basis for dignity for all.”

Stephen Larsen, who has served more than 14 years on the Board of Directors of the Swedenborg Foundation, and Robin Larsen, who is an Honorary Board Member, also serve on the foundation’s Education and Publication Committee.  Robin Larsen was Editor-in-Chief of the monumental, tri-centennial anthology titled Emanuel Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision, published in 1988, 300 years after Swedenborg’s birth, by the Swedenborg Foundation.  The volume includes chapters from authors in Australia, Europe, and North America.   Stephen Larsen wrote the introduction to, and edited, Carolyn Blackmer’s book Swedenborg’s Spiritual Psychology.  He also authored the introduction to the Paulist Press volume on Swedenborg (part of their Classics of World Religion series), edited and translated by Dr. George Bole.   Larsen makes frequent reference to Swedenborg in his award-winning book The Fundamentalist Mind: How Polarized Thinking Imperils Us All (Quest Books).

Radio host Andrea Garrison produces her weekly two-hour program, Online with Andrea, on the Internet at Blog Talk Radio.  Topics on her program include explorations of “health, fitness, body, mind, heart, soul, spirit, the spoken word, art, music, dance, theater, film, the environment, planet earth, and beyond.”  Garrison is also the author of the highly praised book The Crossing Over of Mattie Pearl, also available on CD and DVD.

More information on Stephen Larsen and Robin Larsen and their work can be found at stonemountaincenter.com and symbolicstudies.org.  More information on the Swedenborg Foundation can be found at Swedenborg.com.

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