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Countess Dorothy von Moltke was a devoted Christian Scientist and strong advocate for the German translation of Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook Science and Health. Throughout her life, she worked to make Christian Science more accessible to German-speaking followers by providing English lessons and by serving on the translation committee that ultimately completed the first foreign language translation of Science and Health.

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.

Henniker-Heaton’s meaningful life and Christian Science healing of ten years of paralysis are accompanied by selections from his poetry and other writings. The book’s purpose is to “present the spiritual ideas of this prolific writer in chronological order, setting them in the context of his life.”

Eder finds in Mary Baker Eddy’s writings about masculinity that Christian Science could not be practiced only as an ethereal form of religion (caricatured as a woman) but reflect “a discernible and repeated thrust to extend the reach of Christian Science thought and practice beyond the sheltered sphere of nineteenth-century feminine religiosity into the proving grounds of the public realm.”

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. 

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 structure of this dissertation is a critical theological conversation between Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health and the 2nd-century Christian text, the Secret Revelation of John. It uses methodology from Practical Theology to highlight epistemological contrasts and similarities between the two texts and between their worldviews and orthodox worldviews. A common theological foundation lies beneath healing practices for both texts.

Petersen has made a paraphrase revision of Mary Baker Eddy’s 19th-century textbook, Science and Health, with the purpose of elucidating divine Science for the 21st century. In her Preface she avows her great efforts to keep Eddy’s original meaning of divine Science intact, while using more current (and inclusive) language and illustrations, and quoting from modern Bible versions.

Implementing feminist rhetorical criticism, Tencza examines Mary Baker Eddy’s strategic use of rhetoric to create meaning in her writings, reinforced by the integrity of her character. Tencza sees Eddy working within three frameworks: an ethic of care [mother-like pathos], extreme utilization of ethos [her character integrity], and logos [ability to make meaning]—all of which coalesce into her rhetoric of confidence.

Moses’s 1916 book intended to foster a Jewish spiritual renaissance and to prove that Judaism long held what appears so attractive to the early 20th-century Jewish converts to Christian Science: divine healing, affirmative prayer, and a religion of love and law. He catalogs Jewish scripture illustrating healing and divine love, and contrasts Christian Science tenets with Jewish faith.

In this brief paper, Rider compares theological interpretations of biblical texts between Christian Science and Christian orthodoxy, arguing for a radical difference. The texts he selected include creation stories in Genesis, the Lord’s Prayer, the miracles of Jesus, and his crucifixion and resurrection.

This beautifully crafted book is essentially a compilation of the writings of Stephen R. Howard, who served as director-curator of Longyear Museum from 1997 to 2014. (The museum is an independent historical institution dedicated to the understanding of Mary Baker Eddy’s life and work.) Nearly every page includes multiple photographs, facsimiles, artwork, Illustrations and portraits representing the holdings of the museum.

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. 

Gallagher examines Mary Baker Eddy’s and Helen Schucman’s (A Course in Miracles) interpretation of scripture and development of their own canons. Gallagher sees Eddy’s Science and Health as a Bible companion which has the power to heal the reader and requires deep study. Similarly, Gallagher sees Schucman’s ACIM as indispensable to understanding the Bible, providing a mystical interpretation of scripture.

Gallagher highlights four American alternative Christianities able to maintain continuity and gain legitimacy by retaining elements of the dominant Christianity and texts of its day, while also engaging in a “creative exercise of interpretive ingenuity” that resulted in a novel message evoked from familiar symbolic capital.

Willsky claims Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health (among other 19th-century works) was a reaction to the dogmatism of the Plain Bible ethos of American Protestantism. The predominant interpretation of the Bible as ‘plain’ meant its message, as understood by Reformed and evangelical Protestant culture, was authoritatively true. Eddy made the best attempt to modify this notion with divine healing revelations.

A scholar of American Religious Studies and Women’s Studies, Voorhees examines how 19th-century American social and religious movements impacted Eddy’s evolving first six editions of her book. Each edition provides a thematic window into how Eddy’s writing charted its own independent course. Voorhees explores Eddy’s rhetorical defense for her textbook as both discovery and revelation in spite of its many editions.

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.

This brief encyclopedic entry, written at the request of The Mary Baker Eddy Library, offers in three pages a succinct outline of Mary Baker Eddy’s life and a clear and accurate portrayal of her importance as a student of the Bible and religious thinker. “Her unique method of biblical interpretation will be of interest to biblical scholars… independently of the religion she founded and the healing-system she established.”

Rapport argues that both Christian Science and the Unity School of Christianity came into being during an emerging scientific worldview, and implemented their “scientific rationale and language as a strategy to validate themselves in late 19th-century America.” But, whereas Unity used science to complement Protestantism, Eddy employed scientific language to defy mainstream science and religion.

Specific to Eddy, Ingham relates feminist themes to her groundbreaking textbook, Science and Health, as well as many of her earlier writings and sensibilities. Specifically, Ingham lays out Stanton’s and Eddy’s exegesis of the first and last books of the Bible, thereby providing an interpretive space from which to challenge a singular definition concerning creation in Genesis and prophecy in Revelation.

In the late 19th-century era, when the Pauline corpus was often quoted to legitimize women’s subordination, Mary Baker Eddy presented in her writings a rereading of the Pauline tradition as liberating for women. Huff shows how Eddy made the case and modeled in her life that women as well as men have legitimate dominion and must not be dominated.

Choi’s and Huff’s chapters explore how two 19th-century Christian women, Lucy Rider Meyer and Mary Baker Eddy respectively, interpreted Pauline and deuteron-Pauline texts to validate women’s empowerment in the Church. Hogan then details striking similarities between Meyer’s and Eddy’s approaches to these texts, and that of many recent feminist and womanist scholars.

Johnson’s book expounds on the ‘science of prayer’—based on her own journey of discovery and framed by her Christian Science faith. Each of the seven chapters explores one of Mary Baker Eddy’s seven synonymous terms for God. Each synonym represents a scientific law effectively defeating any challenge that confronts the reader and bringing healing.

Hall examines why Mary Baker Eddy was, and continues to be, underrated and misrepresented. She also provides an accessible introduction to Eddy’s life, and a look at her theology through a feminist lens. Hall cites Eddy’s practical emphasis on healing, the lack of gender hierarchy in her church, her seven non-gender-specific synonyms for God, and God as Mother. 

Primarily useful for high school researchers, this brief chapter on Mary Baker Eddy summarizes her life and teaching. It fits the context of the book which is a celebration of the accomplishments of famous people during their senior years. Despite the intense criticisms against Eddy, her church grew and prospered. She was honored posthumously in 1995 and in 1998.

​​To aid scholars interested in researching primary source materials on the life of Mary Baker Eddy, the Mary Baker Eddy Library provides a summary of its vast holdings, including approximately 20,000 letters, articles, sermons, and other manuscript materials written by Eddy, nearly 8,000 letters written by her secretaries on her behalf, letters by approximately 7,000 different correspondents, and over 800 reminiscences.

Gottschalk, an intellectual historian, left his post at the Christian Science Committee on Publication in 1990, uncomfortable with the leadership of the Church. Still considered a leading Christian Science scholar despite his criticism, he conducted extensive archival research for this book. Gottshcalk focuses on the last two decades of Eddy’s life and her effort to protect and perpetuate her religious teaching.

Swensen documents the long-term effect of Alfred Farlow’s early crusade to protect the growing Christian Science Church from outside attacks, and muzzle an unrestrained and over-zealous faithful. He sees this protective stance as casting a long shadow over the content of future church periodicals, and the reason why members have since shown a deep reticence for personal outreach.

​​According to Simmons, Eddy’s eschatology is understood in its original sense of an unveiling—sometimes conflicting unveiling: an earth-shattering disintegration of the ego. Both ‘catastrophic apocalypticism’ and ‘progressive apocalypticism’ (the journey of progressive unfoldment) can bring about authentic transformation, and revelation of all good, harmonious spiritual reality, or ‘ethical eschatology.’ Simmons seeks a balance on the journey from apocalyptic to paradise.

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. 

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.

Eddy’s Science and Health critiqued the contemporary ideology of invalidism. Male doctors had a vested interest in women’s weakness, making their own treatments necessary. Eddy, by contrast, validated the authority of the patient to bring about healing, thereby giving women more control over their bodies. Eddy’s message emphasized vitality and health for women and diminished biological differences between the sexes.

​​Dunlap’s dissertation is a rhetorical analysis focused on Mary Baker Eddy’s 19th-century life and writings. She examines Eddy’s opponents’ reactions to her intrusion into 19th-century science, theology, and medicine. She also explores the resonance between Eddy’s language about spiritual reality and the metaphysical language of contemporary quantum physics—what brings the seen and the unseen into relation with each other.

Piepmeier studies five women, including Mary Baker Eddy, as examples in 19th-century America of the ‘outing’ of women’s bodies in the public sphere in ways not easily categorized. They had to address the powerful ideologies of domesticity and sentimentality to distinguish their own ideologies. Eddy’s textbook was a rewriting of major discourses, representing a significant rethinking of women’s roles and rights.

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. 

Nenneman’s biography of Mary Baker Eddy highlights his two major themes: her tenacious unyielding sense of purpose, and her role as a pioneer. Nenneman is interested in Eddy’s evolution and progression through her triumphs and trials, loneliness, disappointments, and personal weaknesses. One important theme is Eddy’s habit of seeking guidance from God for her actions, a tribute to her Calvinist heritage.

Stein explores the new scriptures that arose out of America and the three factors present in “the scripturalizing process…—canon, commentary and community” (182). Stein shows how the texts of Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Ellen White and Philemon Stewart became holy scripture within their particular communities, as they each ventured beyond canon to interpret, clarify and expand upon the biblical text.

This collection of brief articles about 14 people who served the Cause of Christian Science during Mary Baker Eddy’s last decades first appeared in a series from The Christian Science Journal between 1987 and 1991. More than imparting interesting historical information, the articles express these individuals’ vital spirit and conviction that moved them to give their all for a Cause.

Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook and church founding are understood by her followers as a recovery of the original Christian events. Christian Science was the rebirth of moribund Christianity, a decisive return to the original authority. Weddle interprets the tribulations of the Christian Science church founding, codified in the Church Manual, as a recapitulation of early Christianity’s struggles with dissent and authority.

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.

As the title of this 70-minute bibliographic video implies, its main message highlights Mary Baker Eddy’s lifelong struggles, determination, and persistence. This video precedes the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Library by 14 years, and its excellent cast of characters make it a valuable resource especially for those unfamiliar with Eddy’s life and work.

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.

Johnsen’s 1980 overview of the multi-decade controversy over a forgery is a response to the enduring nature of the false accusations against Mary Baker Eddy as a plagiarist. Research leading to the discovery of forgery was not difficult, because handwriting experts quickly detected the astonishingly crude and obvious fraud that served as a basis for the accusations.

Abiko’s book is a personal account of the introduction of Christian Science into Japan and its development through her first-hand experiences as the eldest daughter of one of the pioneers. This is not a primer on Christian Science, nor does Abiko write as a historian; rather she draws from deep resources of memory, feeling, and a life of loving and living Christian Science.

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.

Chapel details how Mary Baker Eddy successfully employed ‘argumentative synthesis’–the ability to “unite ideas which appear to be in opposition into a coherent whole.” Reflecting a larger debate in the late 19th-century, Eddy reconciled opposing views such as: science and Christianity, the masculine and feminine, and the Calvinist view of sinning humanity–Eddy’s mortal man–and the more liberal view of humanity as essentially good.

“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.

Beasley’s biography begins with Mary Baker Eddy’s early years, her 1866 breakthrough on the nature of Jesus’s healing, and the publication of her teachings in her textbook Science and Health. The bulk of the book focuses on Eddy’s establishment of her Church and its organizational structure—her means of protecting her teachings and developing movement.

Braden’s book includes a recap of accusations of Mary Baker Eddy’s plagiarism in her writings, the struggles and abuses of power through and after the ‘Great Litigation,’ and the identification of what he finds are inconsistencies in Science and Health and class teaching.

Nineteen years after the publication of Haushalter’s charges of Mary Baker Eddy’s plagiarism, Dr. Moehlman, a member of First Baptist Church of Rochester, NY, published this scholarly rebuttal to those charges. Moehlman, a professor of the history of Christianity, specialized in the study of literary forgeries and demonstrated how Haushalter’s employment of concordance cannot be substituted for scientific analysis of content.

After two disastrous experiences with printers, Mary Baker Eddy found a printer who was both knowledgeable and respectful of her work. According to Orcutt (the author of this book), Wilson enjoyed a 16-year friendship and successful professional relationship with Eddy. Orcutt’s career began under Wilson’s tutelage; he concurred with Wilson’s assessment of Eddy’s keen business sense and value as an author.

A long-time favorite among Christian Scientists, Tomlinson’s work presents Eddy’s life and work in the most favorable light. A sincere student who knew her well in her last years, Tomlinson left to history his impressions of a leader inspired and guided by God. Witnessing her emotional and physical struggles, his admiration for her spiritual courage and strength inspired his hagiographic memoires.

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.

Orgain is known to have authored this ‘anonymous’ book, a comparison of editions of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health. Orgain’s goal was to show that each step for the Christian Science movement was the fulfillment of Jesus’s prophecy of the church he promised to build. Orgain thought Jesus’s church must necessarily await demonstration in the lives of Christian Scientists.

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.

Bancroft’s story of Mary Baker Eddy’s life between the years 1870 and 1875, “as [he] knew her,” represents an unusual mix of profound admiration, tempered with an honest critique of her strengths and weaknesses at that time.  This is the period in which Eddy completed the first edition of Science and Health, and which is not otherwise well documented.

Longyear, the philanthropist who founded the Longyear Museum, wanted to give the world a correct knowledge of the character of Eddy’s chosen helper and husband, Asa Eddy. He gave unselfishly and untiringly during their brief six-year marriage and supported her during some of her greatest trials. His death—a terrible blow to her—had been the source of much speculation.

This article (1918) by Karl Holl (not a Christian Scientist) was a response to a critical review of Holl’s theological defense of Christian Science in a court case. Holl’s defense was neither apologetic nor polemic, but challenged scholars who did not follow the logic and religious teachings of Christian Science sufficiently–who found it easier to scoff than to analyze.

This flagship for Christian Science by Mary Baker Eddy is used as the denominational textbook and was intended by its author to “bear consolation to the sorrowing and healing to the sick” (xii). The book’s theological premise—that Christ Jesus taught and demonstrated the spiritual facts of being—precedes the metaphysical interpretation of scripture that grounds its healing system.

This extremely important report covers the court trial, the ‘Next Friends’ suit against Mary Baker Eddy, which was dismissed. It includes records of pre-trial publicity, court proceedings, and press interviews, and is an important study for the American history of religion, the struggle between religion and science, medical and psychiatric history, legal precedence, and the powerful, long-lasting impact of yellow journalism. 

The contemporary importance of this brief article written in 1889 by Hannah Larminie lies in its theological explanations of Christian Science. It provides some answers to the oft-repeated question about what the correct understanding of Christian Science doctrine is vis-a-vis the mainstream adoption of the Apostles’ Creed. A brief theological interpretation follows each line of the Creed.

Mary Baker Eddy wrote of her first edition of Science and Health (when she was Mary Baker Glover) that it was her most important work and contained the complete statement of Christian Science,—the term she employed to express the divine, or spiritual, Science of Mind-healing. Her final version reflects a shift from a narrative to an explicitly religious discovery.

This book is Walter’s autobiographical account of the first five years after his dramatic healing through Christian Science treatment and his subsequent successful healing practice based on his reading of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health. Walter left the church soon afterward due to his conviction that this healing method should be treated more like a Science than a religious practice.