Resources That Are Not Official Christian Science Publications

In this book of personal essays, people representing a variety of faiths respond to questions about the Covid pandemic and its impact on their spiritual practice. Susan Searle writes from a Christian Scientist viewpoint, and explains that she accepted vaccination in order to continue her public ministry. 

Shirley Paulson responds to questions about the Covid pandemic and its impact on the practice of her faith, Christian Science. She discusses how the pandemic experience highlighted the need for greater maturity in spiritual healing practices, such as more concern for public issues and greater spiritual clarity, strength, and authority.

This article investigates the relationship between religious architecture and real estate development in the United States. Using Christian Science churches from the 1920s and the 2020s as case studies, it argues that when churches engage in real estate development, they often use an aesthetic and business strategy termed “material disestablishment” to downplay their religious qualities and engage more effectively with potential business partners and tenants.

Introvigne determines that Kwon’s book on American painter and Christian Scientist Joseph Cornell is both “a superb achievement and a missed opportunity” (188). Since Kwon acknowledged that Christian Science was “an epistemological structure that shaped [Cornell’s] worldview rather than a set of principles he sought to illustrate” (quoting Kwon, 221), religion scholars would have hoped for more details. 

The derivation of psychotherapy is examined through the contributions of 19th-century American mind-cure movements and personalities such as Swedenborgianism, spiritualism, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Warren Felt Evans, New Thought, Christian Science, and the Emmanuel Movement. These movements’ focus on the connection between the healer and sufferer made them precursors of contemporary psychotherapy’s relation-based methods.

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.”

Wadleigh’s purpose is to help foster a rebirth and reform in the practice of Christian Science—a rebirth that self-knowledge could help advance. Looking through the lens of his own experience as a longtime Christian Science practitioner and insider, he takes up an appraisal of the Church and its members’ persistently unexamined, unresolved challenges and mistakes. He especially seeks more compassion.

Swensen documents how, in the fifteen years after the passing of Mary Baker Eddy (1910-1925), the Christian Science Board of Directors consolidated and centralized their authority both at Church headquarters and over local branch churches. Mirroring a corporate business model, church organization, administration, and standardization were merged with obedience and loyalty. 

The objective of Armer’s study of Mary Baker Eddy’s establishment of her Massachusetts Metaphysical College is to highlight the achievements of women pioneers in higher education and entrepreneurial successes. Characteristics of Eddy’s business success included taking risk, managerial skills, knowledge of the product and the market, financial resources to produce capital, and enough success to produce profits.

Peidle finds common ground between Christian Science and Vedanta (represented by Swami Vivekananda), by examining a speech written by Mary Baker Eddy for the 1893 Parliament of World Religions, as well as her other writings, and Vivekananda’s correspondence. Vivekananda first learned about Christian Science at the Parliament. His later ill health prompted an interest in the nature of healing and reality.

Within the context of how new Christian denominations relate healing systems with the Bible, Paulson cites different traditions that lie on the spectrum between continuationists who believe healing is still possible, such as the Christian Scientists, and the cessationists who see healing as ended with the apostles, and work with medicine for a cure. Christian Science spiritual healing mirrors Christ’s authority.

Hussey examines how Christian Science guided and sustained Nancy Astor as the first woman to sit in the British House of Commons in 1919. Her political career of 26 years focused on temperance and support of women and children. Astor found healing by reading Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook, and with her husband, founded Ninth Church of Christ, Scientist, London.

Frederick documents Eddy’s diverse childhood education and touches on broader issues in the education of girls in early America. Eddy’s home was full of newspapers and many educated visitors and ministers. She was tutored by a brother who graduated from Dartmouth, and at age twenty, Eddy was enrolled in Sanbornton Academy where she studied natural philosophy, chemistry, rhetoric and logic.

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.

When Third Church of Christ, Scientist, Seattle received a congratulatory letter from the Washington Secretary of State for its centennial in 2016, Safronoff began searching old church records and found a thought process along with the recorded unfolding of events. Members wanted their history to show the development of the church and its relationship to the world.

When Furbush attended Principia College in 2014, the admissions application still read: “I will refrain from … homosexual activity…” But on November 18, 2014, Principia changed its century-long discrimination policy against queer people. From 2016-2018, Furbush returned to openly teach (science) at Principia School as the Christian Science institution’s first out faculty member. He says it was an overwhelmingly positive experience.    

Booth seeks correlations between the field of Organizational Development, quantum physics, and Christian Science, with the intent of determining how the principles and practices of Christian Science, in sync with quantum physics, might align with, and be a resource for, business challenges. The thesis is based on interviews with fifteen Christian Scientists about their experience relating their theology to their business practices.

…and its ineradicable link to her personality” (123), a concept that presaged her later appointing Science and Health (along with the Bible) as Pastor of the Christian Science Church. Responses…

O’Brien’s interfaith reflections illustrate how sympathy can help bring heaven to earth—as evidenced in four women: Mary Baker Eddy, Emily Dickinson, Sarada Devi (wife and mission partner to Ramakrishna) and Simone Weil. O’Brien finds a basis for this sympathy in the common conviction found in many religions of “the experience of oneness between the supreme Spirit and everyday empirical reality.”

Luey structures her portrayal of eight famous residents of Massachusetts, including Mary Baker Eddy, around their famous homes. She covers Eddy’s childhood in Bow and Tilton homes; her struggles with poverty and illness in North Groton and renting rooms in various boarding houses; her first purchased home in Lynn, and her last two homes: Pleasant View in Concord, NH and Chestnut Hill in Boston.

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.

Siewers, of the Russian Orthodox faith and briefly, a National Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, observes there are no longer any prominent, mostly Republican, Christian Scientists in the U.S. Congress or White House, or visible in the arts and entertainment industry. He argues that the disappearance and decline of Christian Science is a precautionary tale for more traditional Christian communities.

Steckler and Bartkowski seek to contribute to the scholarly understanding of how religious culture can be transformed through the lived experience of devout adherents. Using theories of subcultural identity and cultural repertoires to understand how Christian Scientists engage social challenges, they conclude that healing treatment options are more flexible and nuanced than often publicized, and other high-tension religions can benefit from a comparison.

Swensen examines the initial flock and organization of the Church Mary Baker Eddy founded and then disbanded ten years later. The early 1880s brought new members and stability, spurring Eddy to organize. But this embattled precursor of today’s Mother Church would be irredeemably challenged by a volatile membership, unreliable preaching by invited clergy, and confusion over competing metaphysical groups.