Emma Curtis Hopkins: Forgotten Founder of New Thought

Harley, Gail M. Emma Curtis Hopkins: Forgotten Founder of New Thought. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.

Harley’s well-researched biography of Emma Curtis Hopkins sheds light on this little-known founder of the 19^th-century New Thought movement. Harley begins with Hopkins’s early years and affiliation with Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science. In 1883, healed by one of Eddy’s students, Hopkins went on to take Eddy’s class in spiritual healing. Hopkins then took charge as editor of The Christian Science Journal for 13 months before being suddenly discharged. Harley draws on a range of scholarship to contextualize the complexity of this event, setting it within the knotty early development of Christian Science. The rest of Harley’s book covers Hopkins’s departure to Chicago and later Manhattan where, for the next 30 years, she would become a prolific writer, organizer of a theological seminary, metaphysical healer, mystic, radical feminist, and teacher of teachers—her students going on to establish the Unity School of Christianity, Divine Science and Religious Science. Harley’s book examines the many differences between the theologies, practices and histories of Eddy and Hopkins, highlighting Hopkins’s belief that the truths of Christian Science could be found in all the great traditions of the world, and in her affinity with transcendentalist thinking and support of social justice causes.

ISBN: 0815629338

See also annotations:

“New Thinking, New Thought, New Age: The Theology and Influence of Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849-1925)” by Deidre Michell

“The Eddy-Hopkins Paradigm: A ‘Metaphysical Look’ at Their Historic Relationship” by John K. Simmons

“The Case of Edward J. Arens and the Distortion of the History of New Thought” by J. Gordon Melton

“New Thought’s Hidden History: Emma Curtis Hopkins, Forgotten Founder” by J. Gordon Melton

“Emma Curtis Hopkins: A Feminist of the 1880s and Mother of New Thought” by J. Gordon Melton