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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Harrington seeks non-medical causes for illness and cures. Beginning in antiquity, she concludes her research with modern scientific research in brain science. Harrison positions Christian Science in the context of the American ‘mind-cure’ movement of the 19th and 20th centuries with two competing groups: scientists and doctors, and those who blur the powers of God and the human mind.

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.

The Divine Healing Movement of the late 19th century attempted to reform evangelicalism by including healing. Curtis makes relevant comparisons with Christian Science, one of its better-known contemporaries, to highlight the rich history of Divine Healing. Their healing examples are quite similar. The relationship between faith healing evangelicals and Christian Science worsened, though, as they both matured and gained more followers.

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.

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.

Hardesty’s book is about the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, but because of the similarities between these movements and Christian Science, she identifies a few significant points of comparison. Although both “saw themselves as based in the Bible, following the practice of Jesus, and accomplishing the miraculous” (4), they vehemently opposed each other and sought to distinguish themselves from each other. 

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 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.

Within the context of the interaction of cultural, intellectual, and religious influences, Prentiss positions Christian Science as a response to orthodox theologies, the lingering effects of the Civil War, horrific medical practices, and the suffrage movement. Christian Science theology appeared to subscribe to Platonic dualism, but its view of matter as a product of a false consciousness distinguishes it from dualism.

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.

Schoepflin lays out the rich historical context wherein Mary Baker Eddy struggled to distinguish and preserve her movement—an amalgam of science, medicine, traditional Christianity, Spiritualism, mesmerism, homeopathy, water cure, mind cure, New Thought, and Swedenborgianism. He sketches out early Christian Science, the training of Christian Science practitioners, Eddy’s formation of church publications and polity, and her administrative savvy.

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. 

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. 

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.

Moore, a historian, places Mary Baker Eddy in her 19th-century social and religious context to examine why her movement was considered by many as ‘occult,’ and yet why so many sensible Americans flocked to Christian Science. “Christian Science (and the other outlier religious groups) grew as a perfectly ordinary manifestation of tensions that were always present in American society.”

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.

Although Ahlstrom’s widely accepted categorization of ‘harmonial religion’ has been critiqued and somewhat abandoned in more recent scholarship, his 1972 analysis of American religious history made a significant impact on religious scholarship. Ahlstrom identifies Christian Science as the most clearly defined and best organized of five harmonial religions.

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.

Hiltner, a leading mid-20th century pastoral theologian, analyzed the shifting relationship between religion and science within the realm of health care and healing. Christian Science was the most successful movement with Christian backgrounds making large claims for the place of religion in healing. Hiltner could not conceive the future of religion without contemporary medical cooperation, though, even in Christian Science.

Johnson’s eye-witness account explains Mary Baker Eddy’s decisions during the period in which she established her church. Succeeding generations have wondered why Eddy created a church with a self-perpetuating Board of Directors and how some of her followers, such as Nixon, Woodbury, and Foster-Eddy posed such threats to the church. He discusses Eddy’s responses to internal power struggles within the movement.

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.

This little-known history of the growth and reception of Christian Science in a pivotal year, 1885, is told through a fictional literary framework. The value of this account is that most history recorded of that period is derived from Mary Baker Eddy or her closest supporters, but this is a rare account of public perceptions of controversies and efforts to find the truth.

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.