Resources by Peel, Robert

Peel, a highly respected scholar and Christian Scientist, represents Christian Science in this dictionary of pastoral care and counseling. Explaining its healing ministry, he addresses the unique theology, metaphysics, and practice of Christian Science. Peel also authored the next dictionary entry on “Christian Science Practitioner,”—practitioner qualifications, status within the church, and role with patients.

Peel analyzes 19th-century Transcendentalism in relation to the philosophy of Christian Science. These historical voices sometimes blended in metaphysical similarities, but the pragmatic nature of a Christian Science commitment to healing was ultimately incompatible with Transcendental idealism. 

Representing the Christian Science tradition, Peel participates in the series “Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions.” He acquaints his readers with Mary Baker Eddy and her theology because the healing practices of Christian Science are incomprehensible without this understanding. He also answers questions regarding the struggle between Christian Science and orthodox medicine, such as the role of practitioners and nurses.

“Discovery” is the first in a three-volume biography of Mary Baker Eddy by Peel, a literary critic, counter-intelligence officer, and editorial consultant to the Christian Science Church. Striving for a straightforward account, without apologetics or polemics, Peel examines Eddy’s intellectual and spiritual path of discovery, from her life of obscurity and loss to her search for health and spiritual breakthrough.

Volume two of Peel’s trilogy covers Mary Baker Eddy’s expanding years of 1877 to 1891, her crucial period of trial and error as she fights for the survival of her nascent movement. She organizes her church, clarifies her revolutionary interpretation of the Bible, and teaches pupils who will carry the message of Christian Science beyond New England to a wider world.

Volume three of Peel’s trilogy covers the final chapters of Mary Baker Eddy’s life—1892-1910—a time when Eddy struggles to balance her movement’s need for organization and preservation with its life-giving inspiration and revelation. As productive as these final decades were, Eddy’s life would continue to be plagued by personal attacks and legal suits that ultimately collapsed.

The editor, Ernest Frerichs, brings together scholars writing about all things biblical in America. In the last chapter, Peel documents the key role of the Bible in Mary Baker Eddy’s life story and the Christian Science tradition, evident especially in Eddy’s textbook Science and Health.  Peel documents Eddy’s 35 years of multiple revisions, resulting from Eddy’s own maturing experience.

Peel, an eminent Christian Science scholar, addresses some challenging 20th-century questions concerning healing the sick through prayer and asserts that the quantitative measurements of science and the qualitative judgments of ethics and religion should no longer be two entirely separate categories. The book contains detailed accounts of medically improbable cures but understood by the patients as ‘healing’ through Christian Science treatment.