A New Christian Identity: Christian Science Origins and Experience in American Culture
Voorhees, Amy B. A New Christian Identity: Christian Science Origins and Experience in American Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
With attention to fully resourced details and modern scholarship, Voorhees outlines the reception history of Christian Science in fields of religion, women studies, American history, politics, medicine, and metaphysics. She probes Mary Baker Eddy’s relationships with her own contemporary thinkers and scholars, religion leaders, and students, making clear “the taxonomic difficulties and persistent core tensions that have marked scholarly efforts to classify Christian Science” (232). Neither an esoteric, theosophically adjacent religion to New Thought, nor a medical system with a Christian overlay, Christian Science identity has been difficult to pin down in a scholarly sense. But with “the flood of new and newly contextualized data in this book, culled from a wide range of external and internal points on the cultural spectrum, . . . Eddy’s Science and Health emerged to describe a distinctive expression of Christianity with a restorationist, revelatory, healing rationale” (231). Voorhees describes her “deeply contextualized view of Christian Science as a radical theology of practical Christian metaphysics with a central concern for the survival of Christianity in modernity through the ‘proof’ of healing” (232). Voorhees’s new and extensive research sheds new light on the inception, evolution, and maturity of Eddy’s authorship of Science and Health.
ISBN-13 (Softcover): 9781469662350
ISBN-13 (Hardcover): 9781469662343
See also annotations:
“Writing Revelation: Mary Baker Eddy and Her Early Editions of Science and Health, 1875–1891.” by Amy B. Voorhees
Related Annotations:
Annotations related by category:
- Availability: Library or Purchase
- Controversy: Mark Twain
- Controversy: McClure’s Magazine (Milmine, Cather)
- Controversy: Next Friends Suit
- Controversy: Quimby-Eddy Debate
- Official Christian Science Publication: No
- Organizations: Massachusetts Metaphysical College
- Organizations: The First Church of Christ, Scientist
- People: Cather, Willa
- People: Darwin, Charles
- People: Dresser, Horatio
- People: Eddy, Mary Baker
- People: Edwards, Jonathan
- People: Evans, Warren Felt
- People: Gestefeld, Ursula
- People: Hopkins, Emma Curtis
- People: James, William
- People: Peabody, Frederick W.
- People: Quimby, Phineas
- People: Stanton, Elizabeth Cady
- People: Twain, Mark
- People: White, Ellen
- People: Woodbury, Josephine
- Publication Date: 2021-Today
- Resource Types: Book
- Subjects: Biographies and Chronologies
- Subjects: Christian Science History after 1910
- Subjects: Church Growth and Change
- Subjects: Church Manual, Governance, Leadership
- Subjects: Feminist Perspectives
- Subjects: Healing and Health
- Subjects: Independent Christian Scientists
- Subjects: Medicine
- Subjects: Metaphysical
- Subjects: Religion
- Subjects: Science and Health Book
- Subjects: Social and Cultural Studies
- Subjects: Theology
Annotations related by keyword:
- Animal Magnetism
- Apocalypse/Revelation
- Authorized
- BIPOC
- Bylaws
- Calvinism and Puritanism
- Critical Analysis
- Gender
- Genesis
- Jesus Christ
- Mind Cure
- New Religious Movements
- New Since the Book
- New Thought
- Politics
- Protestantism
- Rhetoric
- Sin
- Spirituality
- Suffrage
- Swedenborgianism
- Testimony
- Transcendentalism
- War