A DAY WITH THE SWEDENBORG SOCIETY

This day represents a great chance to hear two of the Swedenborg Society’s authors speak about their different work. It will also feature a talk from STEPHEN MCNEILLY, the Society’s new Executive Director, who will speak about recent changes at the Society as well as plans for the coming years.

DR WILLIAM ROWLANDSON, Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Kent, will talk about his new book: Imaginal Landscapes: Reflections on the mystical visions of Jorge Luis Borges and Emanuel Swedenborg (2015), in which he offers a brief but deep-reaching study of the often unknown appreciation Borges had for Swedenborg, showing how the Swedish visionary’s influence has gone a long way to explain Borges’s preoccupations with parallel existences, the infinite, and the mystery of language. Delightfully written and steeped in a wonderful sense of curiosity, Imaginal Landscapes cements Rowlandson’s position as one of the UK’s leading scholars on Borges and raises important questions about the criteria we often use to assess the lives and works of those thinkers and writers who have come to be labelled as mystics.

PROFESSOR MALCOLM PEET, a retired Consultant Psychiatrist and an Honorary Professor in the School of Health and Related Research at the University of Sheffield, will be speaking on his forthcoming book (to be published by the Swedenborg Society in 2016): Medicine, Mysticism and Mythology: Garth Wilkinson, Swedenborg, and Nineteenth-Century Esoteric Culture. James John Garth Wilkinson (1812-99) was a physician and the leading English translator and promoter of Emanuel Swedenborg’s works during the nineteenth century. He was highly regarded by the intelligentsia of his day and was very well connected socially, with friends including Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James Sr. He was centrally involved with several of the popular esoteric movements of his time including homoeopathy, mesmerism, spiritualism and the interpretation of ancient mythology, as well as being politically active in such diverse fields as the deregulation of medicine and the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier. An original thinker, he was able to integrate these interests with his belief in the philosophy of Swedenborg.

Lunch will be provided on the day. People are even welcome to book accomodation at the centre, to stay over the weekend, and enjoy the surrounding Warwickshire countryside.

To book your place please phone or email the Purley Chase Centre directly:

Purley Chase Centre
Purley Chase Lane
Mancetter
Atherstone
Warwicks CV9 2RQ

Tel: 01827 712370
Email: enquiries@purleychasecentre.org.uk
http://www.purleychasecentre.org.uk/event/day-swedenborg-society/

alternatively, to book a place (but not accomodation), you can do so through the Swedenborg Society by the normal means:

Tel: 0207 405 7986

Email: admin@swedenborg.org.uk