Keyword Search Results

The Mary Baker Eddy Library examines Eddy’s correspondence and documents related to the 1881 chartering, development and fruition of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. The College, an institution meant to teach Eddy’s metaphysical healing method, accepted both sexes regardless of age or gender. Eddy intended her students to practice what they learned back in their own communities.

A 20th-century pioneer in the fashion industry, Adele Simpson attributed her significant achievements as an artist and a businesswoman to her practice of Christian Science. It benefitted her by 1) bringing the balance to her life that had been lacking and 2) the idea that all her creative work was governed by God, the one creative Mind, not herself.

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.

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.

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.”

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.    

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.”

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.

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.

Mina Loy’s Christian Science faith with its views of the body, along with 19th-century spiritualism informed her poetry. She conceptualized in her poetry a non-binary kind of embodiment—away from body/soul or life/death—to life as beyond the body. Loy saw death and the physical as illusory and thereby able to break with biological determinism and personality.  

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.

Horton’s page-turner autobiography recounts her courageous experience rising to the highest place of distinction in the Army Chaplain Corps with, as she often heard, two strikes against her: her Christian Science faith tradition and her being among the first few women to enter the chaplain corps.

Stahl’s study of the intertwined relationship between religion and the military opens a unique but revealing window on the role of religion in society. The distinctive role of Christian Science is sprinkled throughout the book. Hempstead Lyons, a Christian Science practitioner, sought to offer services, but the military’s failure to distinguish Christian Science from other groups resulted in excluding him.

The Oconto, Wisconsin Christian Science Church was built in 1886, the first Christian Science church in the world. Lewis, a media representative for Christian Science, commemorates its continuing services over the past 130 years, as well as its place in the National Register of Historic Places. She documents the church’s beginnings and gives a brief biography of Mary Baker Eddy.

Harragin describes three female members of Parliament in the UK in the early 20th century, and how their Christian Science faith sustained them. These three women, Nancy Astor (the first woman in Parliament), Margaret Wintringham and Thelma Cazalet-Keir, paved the way for other women. Harragin shows their faith in their demeanor braving the male-dominated culture of the House of Commons.

Feminist scholarship will benefit from this research on Eddy’s relation to the suffragist movement and why the chapter ‘Marriage’ is placed in an early, prominent position in Science and Health. Eddy had stated that Science and Health had ‘crossed swords with the free love’ as embraced by Spiritualists and Revivalists, even as they were drawn to Christian Science because of its radical departure from the patriarchal church.

The Society of Jewish Science was a response to the mass conversion of Jews, particularly women, to Christian Science. Its purpose was to revive a growing secular Judaism with elements Lichtenstein feared had been lost: healing, personal prayer, and belief in the Divine Spirit within. Unlike Christian Science, the Society did not reject medicine or deny the reality of matter.

In an ecumenical context, Paulson illustrates common ground between the healing mission and Christian salvation of Christian Science which results in a transformed soul and body. But the lack of fellowship between Christian Scientists and other Christians could be due to lack of respect for women’s leadership on the one hand and arrogance on the other, resulting in isolation.

This is the well-researched and definitive history of a major lawsuit (one of the biggest national news items in 1907) against Mary Baker Eddy. Ostensibly, this ‘Next Friends’ suit was to protect the interests of Mary Baker Eddy and her inheritance by way of arguing that Eddy was the helpless dupe of her male employees. Eddy eventually won the suit.

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.

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.”

Voorhees explains that Eddy never intended to become a role model for gender parity, but it emerged naturally as a by-product of her larger purpose and project of revealing the nature of Christian salvation. In contrast to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Voorhees illustrates how the ‘Woman Question’ for Eddy is emphatic and radical, yet qualified and ultimately subsumed by her soteriology.

Simon assesses autobiographies of some early Americans, including Mary Baker Eddy, using affect theory to assess primal sources of original thought that only later become expressible in language and reason. She focuses on Eddy’s Genesis-derived definition of deity that reverses the subordination of women, and her other statements about gender as culturally constructed.

Bibliographer Swensen provides a social profile of the membership, internal operations and founding leadership (Augusta Stetson and Laura Lathrop) of the two largest Christian Science churches in the eastern U.S.—First and Second Church, New York City. Accessing the church records and the extensive correspondence between Mary Baker Eddy and New York church members, Swensen sees his study as a window into the rocket-rise of this vibrant new movement as a whole.

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.

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.

Simon unpacks Mary Baker Eddy’s theological construct of the feminine divine and shows how Eddy mobilizes her conception of a benevolent maternal deity to challenge the gender ideology and conventions of her day. She finds in Eddy’s Genesis interpretation her ultimate goal: her feminized divine is an enabling belief that undoes Adam’s dream—the history of error, an assumed material selfhood.

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.

Michell arrives at four main reasons for the steep decline in Christian Science membership during the second half of the 20th century by interviewing mainly women who have left the Church. Her specific feminist approach to the question provides a painful but valuable critique on the history of the patriarchal style of church decisions after Mary Baker Eddy’s death.

Swensen, Rolf. “‘You are Brave but You are a Woman in the Eyes of Men’: Augusta E. Stetson’s Rise and Fall in the Church of Christ, Scientist.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion  24, no. 1 (2008): 75–89. Augusta Stetson was the controversial founder and leader of the largest Christian Science church in the world—completed in 1903, a magnificent 1.2-million-dollar sanctuary located in New York City. She was one of many women at the turn.

Christian Science is one of the eight religious communities examined because of their illustration of major sociological principles. Mary Baker Eddy is noted for having operated “outside the norms of what sociologists call expected gender role behavior.” The authors ask whether Eddy would rightly be considered charismatic and whether Christian Science would rightly be considered a ‘cult’ or ‘sect.’

Within this all too brief chapter on the life of Mary Baker Eddy, Braude contextualizes Eddy among Spirit-moved women who believed that God’s call was more important than social conventions. These women contributed to American religious history as they balanced family, church, and leadership roles. But the complexity of Eddy’s life is better covered in Braude’s other works.

This article includes an examination of feminism and the quest for gender equality in 19th century America, particularly in rejection of interpretations of the second biblical creation story that justified male dominance and female subservience. One sub-section devoted to Mary Baker Eddy describes her unique interpretation of the spirituality of divine creation, which undergirds Christian Science and the church she founded.

In her review, Bednarowski describes Gottschalk’s study as “a provocative blend of intellectual history, theological analysis, cultural interpretation, and religious conviction” (213). He focuses on the latter, controversial years, in which Mary Baker Eddy was compelled to articulate more definitively for herself and her students the distinctive way that Christian Science should combat various forms of materialism: medical, philosophical, and ecclesiastical. 

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. 

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.

Curtis examines the ‘divine healing’ or ‘faith cure’ movement of the late 19th century which offered a liberalized theology that fundamentally uncoupled the long-standing and deeply gendered link between bodily suffering and spiritual holiness. Faith homes provided worship services, spiritual practices and alternative biblical models that facilitated healing. Examples were water-cure sanitoriums and Christian Science dispensaries, (later converted to Reading Rooms).

Setta, a feminist scholar of 19th-century American religion, identifies some cultural attitudes of Mary Baker Eddy’s day and Eddy’s distinct response to them. Rather than attributing her poor health to her gender, Eddy argued that ‘man’ (both male and female) is God’s spiritual reflection. Society, not God, produced the idea of gender; therefore women could take responsibility for their own health.

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.

​​Kilde, specializing on the intersection of religion and architecture, describes the original 1895 Christian Science Mother Church edifice, built under Mary Baker Eddy’s close supervision, as very feminine with its stained-glass windows depicting many female biblical figures. Kilde contrasts this with the masculine cavernous Renaissance-style classicism of the Mother Church Extension built in 1906 with its ambience of public majesty.

Umansky studies the history of Jewish Science—a movement that arose to counter the estimated tens of thousands of Jews (a majority women) attracted to Christian Science in the late 19th and early 20th century. These Jews had been attracted to Christian Science’s promise of health and healing. Umansky also examines the Christian Science theology that resonated with Jewish beliefs.

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.

Johnson contextualizes theologians Ruether and Eddy within feminist history showing how each “changed the boundaries of the Church’s theological thinking on the rights of women,” freeing them up to be seen and heard. Johnson finds feminist principles at work in Eddy’s writings on marriage laws, use of language, theology (especially her Father-Mother God), and church structure empowering women in roles as local leaders and healers.

Darling and Fiarman explain how a little-known, but important suffragist, Mary A. Livermore, provides an important link to an understanding of Mary Baker Eddy’s attitudes toward woman suffrage.  The movement consisted of multiple approaches. Eddy rejected some, especially those advocates who attacked the Bible as the source of women’s oppression. But with Livermore, Eddy found a suffragist with compatible religious views. 

Corbett examines the ways that Eddy exercised effective leadership in increasingly male-dominated fields from which women were excluded: education, health care, and religion. She is particularly interested in the way Eddy incorporated obstetrics into her system of healing. Corbett also responds to claims that Eddy expressed an ambiguous feminism by championing women’s authority yet promoting male authority within her Church.

Stores, a self-identified gay Christian Scientist, thoroughly researched the relationship between Christian Science Church headquarters and its underreported, turbulent relationship with sexual minorities from the 1950s to the early 21st century. He argues that societal and economic pressures ultimately forced the Church to change its hiring policies.

Stein defends not only the importance of allowing place for minority religions but also their ultimate value to society as a whole. He views them as contributing substantially to the vitality and creativity of the nation’s religious life. Christian Science is one of the ‘alternative religions’ he studies in the context of religious dissent in America.

Michell examines the influences, and theological connections and differences, between the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, Emma Curtis Hopkins, the 19th-century Woman’s movement, and the New Thought and New Age movements. Hopkins, unlike Eddy, would see Truth in all religions, not limited to Christianity, and focused more on a prosperity gospel.

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 graduate level textbook on America’s religions intertwines a wide multitude of religious belief systems with the multi-faceted movements of American thought. Williams explains Christian Science in the context of 19th- and 20th-century American culture, which includes harmonialism, individualism, female empowerment, and cult–a term evangelists equate with theological deviancy but is otherwise characterized by charismatic leadership and isolation from the rest of the world.

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.

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.

Seeing no social change favoring women’s rights, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton switched her energies to addressing the underlying issue of women’s subordination rooted in the Bible. Like Mary Baker Eddy’s opus, Science and Health, Stanton’s Women’s Bible was intended as a vehicle for emancipation. Kern includes Eddy among the many women bearing (indirect) influence on Stanton’s story.

​​Braude looks at how the flourishing of Spiritualism in the mid-19th century intersected with the inception of the women’s rights movement in the same period. She documents that the most serious challenge to Spiritualism and mediumship came from the new religious movement Christian Science. However, although Mary Baker Eddy rejected Spiritualism outright, Braude finds many sympathetic Spiritualists in Eddy’s initial audience.

Michell examines in detail the remarkable similarities where the unorthodox theologies of Julian of Norwich (14th century) and Eddy (19th century) converge. Both women struggled with serious illness and near-death experiences which became the basis for profound revelation and healing.  Eddy understood God as mother, and Julian’s vision of Jesus as mother reflected on the kindness and gentleness of God.

Wood highlights the role of Horton Foote’s faith tradition in his professional work as a highly acclaimed playwright who won a Pulitzer Prize (The Young Man from Atlanta) and Academy Awards for screenwriter (To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies). Wood explains both the theology and practice of Christian Science (especially that of Foote’s loving and nurturing mother) that show through in his writing.

In a time when science and medicine were intent on removing religion from their midst, both Eddy and White actively integrated physical and spiritual concerns in their theology and practice. Although Eddy named her religion Christian Science, logically claiming that its principles could be demonstrated with mathematical certainty, White’s claim to authority was validated by her public visions with signs following.

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.

Bednarowski explores themes of healing in the theological work of women since Mary Baker Eddy, whose quest for healing served as an entry into the construction of an entire religious worldview. Following Eddy’s accident from a fall, a moment of insight into the nature of reality sparked the emergence of her textbook, theology, healing method, and church.

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.

Alice Clark, a British suffragist and historian of women, was influenced by her later affiliation with Christian Science.  In Christian Science, Clark found a synthesis of her Quaker belief in the ‘Light within’ with a gender identity that rejected dominance in a male-governed world of the power of reason and the corresponding value of the feminine for impacting world affairs.

Historian Benowitz’s encyclopedia profile of Augusta Stetson is a chronology of her life from devout Methodist upbringing, to public orator, to Eddy’s request for her to establish Christian Science in New York City, to her increasingly problematic leadership and eventual excommunication from Eddy’s Church.

Schrager finds commonality between Eddy’s theological/therapeutic movement and Twain’s mental telegraphy. Both sought legitimacy by associating their convictions with the newly professionalizing discourse of science. But Twain was threatened by Eddy’s transgression of 19th-century female norms and monopoly of religious interpretation; and Eddy’s integrity of womanhood was threatened, if not seduced, by the aggressive masculinity of mesmerist and physician.

Roe recounts the history of Christian Science coming to Australia from 1890 to Mary Baker Eddy’s death in 1910, when there were 21 accredited practitioners and at least a thousand members. She notes that the earliest testifiers found healing and revelation through reading the Christian Science literature and Eddy’s textbook, Science and Health, but that later healing came through practitioners.

Stark researches the causes of success and failure in religious movements, focusing on Christian Science because of its dramatic rise and decline within short periods of time. He is interested in where ideas went and how they were embodied in social movements, such as the impact of Mary Baker Eddy’s authoritative style, women’s work opportunities, and fertility rates.

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. 

​​This book teaches mostly by pictures the sociological and historical view of women in the healing ministry. In her coverage of Mary Baker Eddy, Brooke emphasizes Eddy’s theological basis for healing from the teachings and example of Jesus. But she (Brooke) ignores the persecution Eddy suffered from the prejudices against women as both healers and Christian leaders.

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.

In her chapter, “Alternative Religions in Nineteenth-Century America,” Lindley shows how this period of fermentation and experimentation fostered new Christian sects which challenged social, economic and religious orthodoxy. Christian Science is one of the four she highlights. Mary Baker Eddy, its founder, was a model of women’s revelatory and authoritative leadership who maintained overall control of her church.

Melton’s uncovering of a largely forgotten history of the relationship between Mary Baker Eddy and Emma Curtis Hopkins provides historians of religion an insightful comparison between two successful women of the 19th century. Although the article’s focus is on Hopkins, her relationship with Eddy illustrates both similarities and dissimilarities in the women and their churches.

Fox studies the process of becoming a Christian Science practitioner and establishing healer validation within the church community. She includes sections explaining Christian Science theology and healing metaphysics, and the relationship between practitioner and patient, from her perspective as a social anthropologist. Her 1995 conclusions suffer from inaccessibility of archival material prior to the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Library.

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. 

Braude examines whether the doctrines of 19th-century Spiritualism and Christian Science empowered women or limited their opportunities. Although women accepted these opportunities, as mediums in Spiritualism and as teachers and healers in Christian Science, their roles required some passivity.  Christian Science women were empowered in support of their churches, but for the perpetuity of Eddy’s vision, women lived under her shadow.

Becker compares the striking similarities as well as the differences between the unorthodox history, writings, theology, and codified methods of healing of the founders of two religious movements: Miki Nakayama of Japan’s Tenrikyo, and Mary Baker Eddy of America’s Christian Science.

McDonald notes that most feminist and psychological explanations attribute the success of Christian Science not to its theological worth, but for its personal utility. These explanations ironically resemble the traditional reductionism assigned to public women by 19th-century men—ironic because a decade of feminist scholarship on Eddy has helped to reinforce patriarchy. McDonald examines these social, intellectual, and religious stereotypes.

Throughout Christian history those movements deemed heretical often included participation by women—including the much-criticized Christian Science founder, Eddy. Trevett wonders why Eddy, with all her germane experiences and theology, went mostly unnoticed by many feminist thinkers. She concludes Eddy’s nontraditional and non-creedal interpretation of scripture, contrary to most mainstream orthodox feminist scholars who critiqued patriarchal attitudes, contributed to the difficulties.

Lindley finds Mary Baker Eddy’s ideas of feminism ambiguous, whether seen within the context of 19th-century American views of womanhood or compared to contemporary feminist theology. For example, regarding gender equality, Eddy elevated the interpretation of women in the Bible and embraced the radical demand for equality of men and women. But she did not identify with the women’s movement.

Hansen examines the formative period of the Christian Science movement and discovers not only restorations of health but also healing as a religious act. From this, Hansen distinguishes Christian Science from the women metaphysical healers of the same period who eventually formed the New Thought movement. Eddy’s declaration, “This is woman’s hour” conveys the female contribution to Christian Science.

Bednarowski analyzes the roles of women in 19th-century marginal religious movements (including Christian Science) considering these movements’ perception of the divine, interpretation of the Fall, need for a traditional ordained clergy, and women’s roles other than marriage and motherhood. Regarding Christian Science, Bednarowski notes women were present as writers, preachers, teachers, and healers. They also found independence through opportunities for leadership.

Porterfield claims Mary Baker Eddy’s contribution to feminine spirituality in America took place during a significant cultural transition in American history and that Eddy’s religious practices were due in part to her legitimation of those practices as a science. Porterfield also explores Eddy’s views of Mary (mother of Jesus) bearing the Christ idea in the pure form of the female body.

​​Forty years after publication, Silberger’s conclusions about Mary Baker Eddy appear to rest more on secondary polemical sources and his personal psychological theories than clinical justification. True, scholars had very little access to primary sources until the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Library in 2002. Unfortunately for Silberger’s argument, the Church archives now discredit the validity of his sources.

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.

Modern scholars explain Mary Baker Eddy’s frequent childhood illnesses from a variety of perspectives. Setta argues they were symptomatic of the 19th-century form of American Calvinism. Eddy’s illnesses were pronounced when her femaleness was most pronounced (marriage and birth). Rejecting the 19th century female role, Eddy reinstated feminine qualities of Deity, whereby women and men are both seen as spiritual beings.

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.

Parker’s psychoanalytical approach to understanding Mary Baker Eddy brings Twain’s ambition analysis and Fiedler’s sanctity of 19th-century female spirituality into tension. Parker sees Eddy’s desire to sublimate her willful personality through submission to the purity and safety of the feminine, while exploiting the culture of womanhood to fulfill her drive for success in leading a religious movement and hiding her ambition.

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.