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

 “A Typology of American Restitutionism: From Frontier Revivalism and Mormonism to the Jesus Movement.” by Samuel S. Hill