Ask Swedenborg is not intended to generate theology from scratch. It makes a large, difficult corpus searchable, traceable, and reusable: users ask questions, inspect the passages behind an answer, follow biblical references, save relevant material, add notes, and carry that evidence into later writing.
A constrained research loop
Questions can be asked in English or German. The application searches Swedenborg’s indexed writings and Bible material together, then presents an AI-assisted explanation alongside the retrieved evidence. Citations use Swedenborg’s paragraph numbering rather than invented page references.
The design principle: AI may help find and explain material, but it is not the authority. Original passages remain available for verification.
What is live
Corpus search and answers
The central research interface retrieves Swedenborg and Bible material together and grounds answers in passages rather than relying only on general model knowledge.
Source verification
Paragraph citations such as Arcana Coelestia §2893 can be followed back to the evidence used in an answer.
Research Workspace
Passages can be bookmarked, retained across sessions, and annotated—turning a one-off conversation into reusable research.
Writing Assistant
Selected passages and user notes can be brought into a limited, source-grounded drafting environment for commentary, study papers, or sermon notes.
Pragmatic research infrastructure
The application is deliberately small and practical: a PHP backend, HTML/CSS/JavaScript frontend, SQL/MariaDB data layer, Pinecone vector search, Google OAuth, and retrieval-augmented generation over a controlled corpus. Pinecone is retrieval infrastructure—not a user-facing feature—used to locate semantically related passages when a reader does not know the exact wording or paragraph.
Where the research model is going
The next architectural direction is to retain investigations as structured research objects, rather than only prose chat. A future object can connect a question, claims, Swedenborg passages, Bible passages, citations, notes, and relationships—so a study can be reopened, combined, compared, and passed into a fuller writing workflow without losing its provenance.
That work is in development. As an unfunded independent project, Ask Swedenborg is best understood as a focused applied-AI research experiment rather than a commercial theological platform.
Related research: RAG for theological research: keeping citations visible →
Explore Ask Swedenborg
Research first. Generate second. Verify always.