Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism

Gottschalk, Stephen. Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Gottschalk, an intellectual historian, was a former Church employee who left his post at the Christian Science Committee on Publication in 1990, uncomfortable with the leadership of the Church. Even after he left, he was considered a leading Christian Science scholar despite his criticism of Church leadership. He performed extensive archival research at the Mary Baker Eddy Library for his book; indeed, this was the first Eddy biography published using the Library’s collections. It focuses on the last two decades of Eddy’s life and “her effort to protect and perpetuate a religious teaching that could provide an alternative to the materialism she saw as potentially engulfing traditional Christianity” (1). The book is organized topically and concentrates on the many public controversies from 1890 to 1910, including the Woodbury suit (1899-1901), the ‘Next Friends’ suit (1907), and Augusta Stetson’s expulsion from the Church (1909). Focusing on controversy enables Gottschalk to examine Eddy’s public responses, which he argues were decisive for the future of Christian Science, helping “to establish the Christian identity of Christian Science” (141). Consequently, Gottschalk records the history of Eddy’s commitment to antimaterialist ideas, which he believes is still relevant in the burgeoning materialism of the 21st century.

ISBN-10: 0253223237
ISBN-13 (Softcover): 978-0253223234

See also annotation:

“Book review of ‘Rolling Away the Stone’ by Stephen Gottschalk” by Mary Farrell Bednarowski