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Voorhees offers new scholarship on a broad array of topics related to Christian Science identity focusing on reception history. 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 contemporary scholars, religion leaders, and students.

McNeil’s extensive research of all the original papers of Phineas P. Quimby in conjunction with the vast holdings of The Mary Baker Eddy Library has brought resolution to the complex questions about the alleged influence mental healer Quimby had on Eddy’s later founding of Christian Science. McNeil also covers other important 19th-century figures as well as other relevant subjects, such as Mark Twain and Christian Science and early animal magnetism in 1830s and 1840s America.

Mary Baker Eddy was among the first religious figures to research intellectual property–her activism resulted in the passage of the Copyright Act of 1909. She saw copyright “as a legal bulwark maintaining both the internal coherence of her work and its ineradicable link to her personality,” presaging her later appointing Science and Health (along with the Bible) as Pastor of the Christian Science Church. 

Reesman details many parallels between Mark Twain’s troubled later life and his one-dimensional literary portrayals of both Joan of Arc and Mary Baker Eddy. Both were visionaries. Joan’s voice in her trial record is consistent, but Eddy was delusional. Eddy uses her mentor, Quimby’s, words for her own profit. Both of Twain’s literary portrayals put his own personality on full display.

Hamilton contends that the Bible, not Phineas P. Quimby or Transcendentalists, was the primary influence on Mary Baker Eddy’s life and writings. She never assigned authority to her primary work “Science and Health” over the Bible—the most significant source for her ideas. The Bible and Christianity were the focus of her 30-year writing and revisions of “Science and Health.”

The metaphysical nature of the religious belief and practice of Christian Science triggered theological, ecclesial, legal, medical, scientific, and moral controversies. Mary Baker Eddy also dealt with stress and trauma throughout her life. The metaphysical aspect of Christian Science does not detract from its practicality in human experience, as the metaphysically induced healing is evidence of the full salvation to come.

The focus of this article is an explanation of Christian Science within the religious context of its American origin and development. Melton claims that Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, and Transcendentalism prepared the way for two important religious movements of the 19th- century: Christian Science and New Thought. The author also gives relative importance to the role of independent Christian Scientists.

Dean, a graduate student in American Religious History, examines the life of Mary Baker Eddy through a psychological lens—”her desires, her fears, the way in which she came to this [Christian Science] doctrine, and her state of mind throughout her life” (61). His aim is to humanize Eddy beyond the stereotypical views of her as either saint or fraud.

Squires sees the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Library as an opportunity for literary scholars to give closer attention to the history, doctrines, and distinctions of Christian Science. Only then will there be an honest and accurate account for the literature that seeks to represent or critique them. 

Kramer’s well-researched critique on Christian Science makes her arguments easier to understand than most critics. She grasps the fundamental teachings and history of the religion well, but she left it for doctrinal reasons. Most of Perfect Peril describes her emotional and intellectual struggles with doctrinal issues. Following a crisis of faith, she concluded that Christian Science is a dangerous mind control. 

Janik traces the historical path of mesmerism from Franz Mesmer’s late 18th-century theories on animal magnetism, leading to de Puysegur’s discovery of hypnosis, to Charles Poyan’s 1830 lecture tour introducing mesmerism and hypnotism to New England, to Phineas Quimby’s mind cure practice, to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science movement, to New Thought and eventually today’s clinical psychology.

Hendrickson discusses the American history of metaphysical healing practices from Native Americans to the present and identifies characteristics of diverse types of healing. Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science are discussed within the context of Quimbyism and New Thought, with the distinction made between the Christian basis of Eddy and the more materialistic, secular basis of the latter.

Hutchinson defines New Thought as any American metaphysical religion affiliated with Phineas P. Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy and Emma Curtis Hopkins. They expanded from their emphasis on healing to a focus on prosperity theology; and Hutchinson observes that since Eddy rejected materialism, the New Thought emphasis on prosperity—while popular in mainstream Christian America—differentiated it from Christian Science.

Horowitz assigns Christian Science a prominent place in the development of American affirmative-thinking (his term) philosophical systems. Although he acknowledges Mary Baker Eddy’s interest in Quimby (a 19th-century mesmerist) and her debt to him during a prolonged time of illness, Horowitz believes that Quimby was not the founder of Christian Science. Instead, Eddy herself created a brigade of spiritual freethinkers.

Although written for young readers, “A World More Bright” contains details for those interested in the personal side of Mary Baker Eddy’s life story. For those more familiar with other biographies on Eddy, this book offers new facts that may be useful for filling in gaps of historical interest. Typical biographical controversies are mentioned but not critiqued by the authors.

Albanese’s undergraduate textbook explains Christian Science in the context of the evolution of religions and the meaning of religion in America. Christian Science was one of the 19th-century new religions that made considerable demands on its members, as new sects often did.  Albanese’s theological explanations of Christian Science are based on her thorough knowledge of the American metaphysical movement.

Ivey’s history of Christian Science covers a broad range of topics including a brief history of Eddy’s personal preparation for the founding of the Church, the healing theology of Christian Science, the establishment of the Church, broader contexts of the appeal of Christian Science, the role of language for its expression, the maturing years in the early 20th century, and the challenges of adapting to a changing world in the late 20th century.

Ivey presents historical context for the 19th-century emergence of metaphysical religions and their evolution into the 20th century. He highlights the inter-relationships between the practice of Phineas Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, and the ensuing movements. Ivey differentiates the theology of Christian Science from Quimby and New Thought—with the human mind acting as a conduit between spirit and matter.

Albanese’s study of the meaning and role of metaphysics in American religious development includes magical practices (which she equates to healing), Spiritualism, occultism, theosophy, and extra- and post-Christian concerns such as Christian Science. She distances such metaphysics from Gnosticism and from Ahlstrom’s rubric of harmonialism. But significantly, it has played a key role in the culture of the modern state.

Cunningham provides a thorough introduction to the life of Mary Baker Eddy, theological distinctions of Christian Science, the Church founding, evolution of the Church Manual, more recent developments such as recent legal and financial struggles, the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Library, and whether Eddy and her followers were feminists.

Simmons contextualizes Mary Baker Eddy amidst the late 19th-century era of revolutionary change showing how her forebears (Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism, Transcendentalism and Spiritualism) “prepared the psychic way” by making explicit to “the American spiritual imagination the connection among physical, psychological, and spiritual health” (94). He reviews Eddy’s theology, the influence of Quimby, and the evolution of Christian Science as an institution.

Medical practices have waxed and waned as part of Christian healing practices from antiquity. Porterfield devotes two pages to Mary Baker Eddy’s contributions as an heir to Wesley. Eddy’s engagement with mesmerism led her to relinquish many aspects of evangelical theology. In her break with the materialist elements of mesmerism, Eddy followed Quimby, but went beyond him with her biblical interpretation.

The book establishes an important framework for understanding the content selected for the faith groups within the New Religious Movements (NRM) study. The primary documents representing Christian Science include writings from Mary Baker Eddy and some testimonials. The description of Christian Science covers its metaphysical origins; its theological foundation; its practice of healing; and comparisons with mainstream Christian doctrine.

Griffith investigates the roots of Christian dieting and fitness and their present-day embodiments. One chapter explores 19th-century mind-cure movements, including Phineas P. Quimby, Christian Science and New Thought, with their connection between mind and matter. She sees in Mary Baker Eddy a contradiction between her radical stance on body as delusion and her rich living circumstances.

Fuller describes contributions of major figures in the history of American religion, with a focus on those whose contributions were controversial but ultimately highly influential. He considers Mary Baker Eddy the best-known of Quimby’s student-disciples, arguing that Eddy reworked Quimby’s ideas with more explicit connection to scriptural passages. But the Christian Science role in introducing Americans to metaphysical spirituality was enormous.

This book is Mary Baker Eddy’s response to the vicious accusations by Frederick Peabody, a lawyer who represented a client in litigation against Eddy. Eddy’s advisors recommended she not publish her book because of the possibility of further public agitation. But it was published by the Christian Science Publishing Society for the first time in 2002. 

Simmons explores the reasons for the parting of ways between Mary Baker Eddy and one of her followers, Emma Curtis Hopkins. He speculates that the Hopkins-Eddy relationship embodied the second and third stages in the process of spiritual transformation where Hopkins moved through Christian Science and “graduated” to a higher spiritual level.

This well-researched biography of Emma Curtis Hopkins, little-known founder of the 19th-century New Thought movement, includes Hopkins’s early-stage affiliation with Mary Baker Eddy—her tutelage by Eddy and editorship 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 knotty developmental stage of Christian Science.

This large anthology of primary and secondary sources is of great value to scholars because it was published in conjunction with the 2002 opening of the Church archives in the new Mary Baker Eddy Library. Some sections provide material not readily available in other published works, such as early family letters and images and transcriptions of pages from Eddy’s Bibles.

Schoepflin includes short sections on the Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons and Christian Scientists, seeing them as movements which used science as a “tool for apologetics.” He shows how Mary Baker Eddy combined the tools of science (reason and empiricism—in the evidence of bodily healing) with “the spiritual and immaterial dimensions of Christianity” (311).

Both Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science movement and the New Thought Movement flourished in the late 19th-and early 20th-centuries. They agreed that one’s mental fears foster illness and distress. Yet unlike the New Thought Movement—believing in the human mind’s ability to control the world—Eddy thought a reliance on the mortal mind’s power distracted from one’s reliance on God.

Taves’s work is a study of religious experience with a focus on the difference between the indwelling Spirit of God and a lively imagination. Although Mary Baker Eddy was a patient and student of Phineas Quimby’s, Taves identifies the crucial distinction between them through Eddy’s differentiation of spirit from matter. Quimby valued both states simultaneously whereas Eddy held them in complete opposition.

Historian Benowitz’s encyclopedia profile of Mary Baker Eddy is a chronology of her life: her childhood and early marriage and widowhood; her desperate attempts to find healing; her early struggles to establish herself; the publication of her textbook, Science and Health, in 1875; the tumultuous beginnings of her Church characterized by lawsuits and disenchanted students; establishing The Christian Science Monitor.

Gill, a feminist historian and biographer, offers a fresh view of Mary Baker Eddy’s achievements in the light of obstacles faced by women in her time. Without access to Church archives Gill relied on Peel’s archival research. Gill’s unique contribution challenges the traditional biographers’ view of Eddy as a hysterical invalid who abandoned her son and stole her ideas.

This book’s study on the history of Christian theology in America includes Mary Baker Eddy’s contributions. Eddy’s theological treatise, Science and Health, distanced itself from literal interpretations of the Bible, interpreting central Christian elements in terms of mental experience. Porterfield finds Eddy’s theology coherent and more fairly understood as a remarkably creative if unschooled form of American Protestant thought. 

Melton argues that the history of the Eddy-Quimby debates obscured other important historical facts, besides the truth about both Eddy and Quimby.  From Melton’s closer look at this case, he concludes that Evans could not be the founder of New Thought, and that Mary Baker Eddy—not Quimby—must be the true founder of Christian Science.

Wills examines a range of past leaders—each paired with an “antitype” or “one who exemplified the same characteristics by contrast.” Wills sees Mary Baker Eddy’s story as mirroring 19th-century America—turning from the past’s “punitive Calvinism” to opportunism, “healthy-mindedness” and spirituality “untainted by the materialism of the times.” Wills also examines Eddy’s tutorship under Phineas P. Quimby (her antitype).

Knee presents one of the most accurate and scholarly explanations then (1994) available on the relationship between Christian Science, Eddy’s former mentor, Phineas P. Quimby, and other American metaphysical religions. Knee also assesses the reactions of other faith communities toward Christian Science, especially Jews, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Protestants, and Swedenborgians.

Christian Science and New Thought both conveyed a “metaphysical perfectionism” in sync with late 19th-century American can-do spirit and the golden glow of California culture with its promises of prosperity. Key women in Christian Science left the movement to become teachers and prime movers of New Thought in California. Other reasons for the decline in both movements today are discussed. 

Gottschalk’s overview of Christian Science sees it as not philosophically derived but based on the works and salvation of Jesus, a new interpretation of the gospel, and the “operation of divine power comprehended as spiritual law.” Gottschalk compares Christian Science and traditional Christian views, as well as distinguishes it from idealism, pantheism, mind cure, and New Thought.

Christian Science is one of the established cults (“popular label given alternative religions”) selected for Melton’s 1992 study. He addresses both the controversial subjects and the false stereotypes associated with them. Christian Science is selected because of its substantial size, the presence of continuing controversy, and the fact that evangelical Christian counter-cult ministries oppose it for deviating from orthodox Christianity.

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.

Albanese argues that the 19th-century American interests in both physic and metaphysic showed striking points of connection and overlap.  American metaphysical religion paradoxically also expressed forms of the theology of nature. But Mary Baker Eddy, a former Quimby patient and student, achieved the greatest clarity regarding matter and mind, given the inconsistencies of the theology-of-nature heritage.

Johnsen claims that it was not mind cure, or Phineas P. Quimby (evaluated in detail) that influenced Mary Baker Eddy; rather it was the profoundly shifting Puritan tradition which infused the 19th-century “New England mind” and was the religious milieu out of which Christian Science emerged. Johnsen demonstrates how Eddy, with her Congregational background in tow, “carried forward certain essential dimensions of [Jonathan] Edwardsian thought and piety.”

Franz Mesmer believed that through the use of magnets he could manipulate an invisible energy or fluid that he called ‘animal magnetism,’ which existed in all beings, to cure patients. The focus of mesmerism was the balancing of this energy. Several 19th-century American thought leaders, including Mary Baker Eddy, acknowledged the influence of mesmerism in their teaching methodologies.

Sizer argues that the multiple forms of mind cure of the 19th century arose from the metaphoric and poetic language of the 18th century. She traces threads of old metaphors used by mind-cure systems to justify themselves against the theories of orthodox medicine. Mary Baker Eddy went even further toward transcendentalism in Science and Health, using emotional, musical, or visceral metaphors.

Meyer’s purpose was to assess religion as therapy: as a cult of reassurance, as psychology of peace and positive thinking. After a brief biography of Mary Baker Eddy’s life, Meyer positions Christian Science as a kind of psychotherapy dressed in religious attire —mind cure’s tightly organized, exclusive denomination. However, his perception is based on very few and dated resources.

Fox, a social anthropologist, claims that Mary Baker Eddy and the early Christian Science movement functioned socially as a protest movement against 19th-century social assumptions and roles assigned to women. Eddy and the women who followed her found leadership and healing roles independent of the social, religious and medical authority of men. But Christian Scientists did not recognize their historical role.

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.

Gottschalk was a Christian Scientist whose 1973 book was a more frank presentation than previous accounts of Mary Baker Eddy’s life by an insider. For instance, although he claims that Christian Science is the only true Christian religion, he criticizes Christian Scientists for certain attitudes and behaviors that reveal a shallow understanding of Eddy and the rigor of Christian Science practice.

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.

Judah’s 1967 monograph on the metaphysical movements of 20th-century America remains a valuable resource for a comparison between movements and a documentation of their impact on organized Protestant Christianity.  Regarding Christian Science, Judah claims most of its basic biblical doctrinal points are similar to the beliefs of historic Protestantism, but their full explanations place them outside traditional Christian theology.

“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.

Before Conrad Moehlman’s scholarly 1955 rebuttal of Haushalter’s accusations of plagiarism against Eddy was published, Haushalter’s 1936 book had garnered a great deal of publicity. His charge that Eddy lifted Hegelian theology and established her chief doctrinal points in Science and Health from Hegel stems from a complicated (undocumented) tale of secret passage through one of Eddy’s early students.

Smith, a prominent Christian Scientist who held many senior positions in the church, brought together this collection of articles originally published in The Christian Science Journal as a series titled “Historical and Biographical Papers.” The articles are divided into three parts: biography, organization and history; including Mary Baker Eddy’s childhood and beginnings of her career as author, healer, teacher, and organizer.

Powell’s 1930 work intentionally challenges Dakin’s Biography of a Virginal Mind. It also contrasts with Powell’s own 1907 work, Christian Science: The Faith and Its Founder, which presented a far more negative view of Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy. Powell, an Episcopal clergyman and an academic writer, made good use of his considerable access to the Church’s archival collections.

This 1930 biography on Mary Baker Eddy appears in this contemporary bibliography because of its role in Christian Science history. Without access to church archives and drawing on others who discredited her, Dakin’s biography reads like a conspiracy theory against Eddy. An important comparison can be made between Dakin’s and Lyman Powell’s biographies of the same year. 

If Bellwald had had access to archival resources on Christian Science, he might have made a more accurate comparison between Christian Science and Roman Catholicism of the early twentieth century. His organizational approach to his study is well conceived, but he combines the resources of blatant polemics, Milmine and Peabody, with his own Catholic perspectives to denounce Christian Science.

Peabody, legal counsel for Josephine Woodbury in a 1901 lawsuit against Mary Baker Eddy, lost the case, but continued accusing Eddy of immorality and abuse in this 1910 book. Peabody also supplied testimony against Eddy for McClure’s magazine, which led to another trial, the ‘Next Friends’ suit (that Eddy also won). Eddy had been counseled against publishing her 1901 response. 

Podmore’s 1909 study of mental healing establishes a trajectory from Mesmer’s dismissal of healing in the churches, through the materialism in animal magnetism, through the psychical side of Spiritualism, toward clairvoyant diagnoses of Quimby, and finally returning to the church in the arrival of Mary Baker Eddy’s religion. The book consists of a historical context for the mind-body experimentation.