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BOOK REVIEW

There is An Answer: Living in the Post-Apocalyptic World, by Candace Frazee. Bunny House Books, Pasadena, California. 2008

Available through Candace Frazee, $30 plus $5 s/h U.S., Canada, Mexico, $10 s/h International. Write to 1933 Jefferson Drive, Pasadena, CA 91104.

Candace Frazee has been writing a monthly newsletter about “Emanuel Swedenborg” called S.I.L.A., Swedenborg Information Los Angeles, now for 20 years. This book is a celebration of this contribution, by selecting from all these newsletters. This was a blurb about Swedenborg: “You know the Swedish, 18th century scientist that spoke to angels! Never heard of Swedenborg (1688- 1772)? You’re not alone. For 20 years, she has been helping others to understand Swedenborg. People from as far as Australia, Japan, and Kenya write to Candace with difficult questions about life and death.”

Candace has filled this entertaining and informative volume with a whole string of photos of meetings with noteworthy people, both New Church, business friends and TV producers. She was interviewed on NBC news in Atlanta in 1996, when the Mayor of Atlanta proclaimed July 2 to 6, 1996, to be “Angel Festival Days” (p. 376).
Candace also is well known for hosting the annual Angel Festival in Los Angeles, now in its 15th year, and is in the Guinness Book of Records for “most bunny items in the world.”

The paper back 377-page book is full of pictures and illustrations, and reads like a glossary of straight information on everything linked to Swedenborg or the New Church. It has a colorful front cover, with the bottom half a cartoon of Candace with a magnifying glass looking at a book. There are 10 chapters, from “Meet God’s Ghostwriter” through Angels, Cults, down to ‘Real Dead People Swedenborg Visited,’ and ‘Who’s Who in Swedenborgianism.’ This last chapter begins with ten pages listing all the well known people who have “owned Swedenborg’s books, used his doctrines, been members of the New Church, or written about him,” etc. Ten pages, with dates. Did you know Hector Berlioz is among them? A shorter list tells us who “plagiarized Swedenborg, used him to their own advantage, or borrowed terminology without giving credit, or even twisted his words, or attacked him!” There is a space for you to list more names if you know them.

On p. 222 and 223 are pictures of Candace’s wedding to Steve in 1994, with Rev. John Odhner as one of the officiating ministers. One picture has Steve’s buddies forming an arch of bicycle wheels! Steve is an aficionado of racing bicycles, having invented and patented several revolutionary bicycle parts. The pictures come with an answer to a question about marriages in heaven!

Other pictures are very informative, such as Sumerian and Mesopotamian stone reliefs of winged humans. There are 10000 year old cave paintings of humans with halos. Candace explains the ancient knowledge of the meaning of wings, and that “people’s understanding of angels waned so far that most think angels are separate beings with halos and wings!” (p. 171)

You may pick and choose your “answers” to questions you have not even thought of, spending hours of reading in this delightful publication. Candace thanks all her “consultants” crammed into one page Acknowledgments in front. Her Bibliography also reads like a Who’s Who in the New Church, all on its own. A short index directs you to topics you may not think of yourself. She consults for veracity, and I myself think she deserves a medal for spreading news of Swedenborg further and wider than most.