Printing, ministry and a scholarly career
Woofenden was born in Ontario in 1921 and grew up in Detroit. He trained in typesetting and proofreading before serving in the United States Army during the Second World War. After the war he pursued theological study, married Louise Dole in 1950 and earned his bachelor’s degree at Boston University in 1952. He was ordained in 1953 and began parish work in New York.
Further study at Saint Louis University led to graduate degrees, while teaching and editorial work became central to his career. At the Swedenborg School of Religion he taught theology and philosophy for twenty years. He founded and edited Studia Swedenborgiana, and his research manual developed into the Swedenborg Explorer’s Guidebook. He died in Maine in 2012, leaving tools for both specialist researchers and readers approaching Swedenborg for the first time.
Making texts available and asking how to read them
Woofenden served as series editor for the Redesigned Standard Edition of Swedenborg’s works. The project reset earlier English translations electronically and clarified some of their language. His guidebook supplied bibliographies, terminology and directions to documentary collections, making the history of the texts part of the work of understanding them.
Earths in the Universe also became a subject of his own writing. In a 1976 article on interpretation, he examined competing approaches to Swedenborg’s reports about inhabited planets and the moon. This is a connection through scholarship. The 1875 Swedenborg Society edition available in Lumitheca predates Woofenden’s birth and was not edited by him; it appears here as the historical text discussed by a later scholar.
