Keyword Search Results

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.

After the healing of her son through reading Science and Health, Marietta Thomas Webb became a devoted student of Christian Science and eventually, one of the first Black Journal-listed Christian Science practitioners. This article shares her journey of finding Christian Science, and the racial discriminiation she faced as a Black Christian Science practitioner.

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.”

Prominent business woman of franchised beauty shops, Martha Matilda Harper, publicly accredited Christian Science with healing her and sustaining her through decades in business. Harper set up a system of training for the many women of modest means who became operators of the 500 franchises, which by the 1930s were spread throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.

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.

This report examines the history of Black Americans’ interactions with the Chrisian Science church beginning with the 1919 formation of the Committee on General Welfare, and then focusing on the racial unrest of the 1960s. This coverage included the demands made by Black community activists during the church’s 1969 Annual Meeting and the Board of Directors’ written response.

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.”

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.

Nenneman’s interest in Christian Science was due not to its healing message, but to Mary Baker Eddy’s deep spirituality and theological answers regarding the nature of God and Jesus’s mission. He profiles the great thinkers who wrestled with similar visions of reality as Eddy: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures and Christian New Testament, and those found in the flourishing exchange between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages. 

From his study of six Christian Science West Coast churches between 1880-1915, Swensen, a social sciences bibliographer, provides a detailed social profile of particular Christian Scientist leaders, the churches they established, and why they flourished after 1900. The Pacific Coast, with its influx of those seeking a better climate, along with its religious diversity, was fertile ground for Christian Science

​​Eight decades after Eddy’s passing, Nenneman addresses the question of the relevance of Christian Science in modern times. He acknowledges that for many mainline Protestant churches the language of religion has changed, and that Christian issues have also shifted from pressing doctrinal concerns toward social justice and personal moral issues. He concludes with the continued need for supporting Christian healing.

​​In Wilson’s study of social dimensions of new religious movements, Christian Science is an example of one that provides existential and intellectual alternatives to normal social facilities. Topics of study include healing practices, the role of charismatic leaders, American-born religions, pragmatism, intellectual orientation, and the means of enduring in changing society. Communal involvement is low, and insulation from evil is operative.

This small but unique book contains details about Mary Baker Eddy’s domestic life between 1868 and 1870, when she boarded with the Wentworth family in Stoughton, MA. This was a period in which she was separated from her husband, Daniel Patterson, and had no source of income. She moved frequently, boarding with various families who were interested in her work.

The War Relief Committee was established by The Mother Church in Boston in 1914 after the outbreak of WWI to relieve families and individuals who were adversely affected by the war. This book is a report of those activities by individuals and groups (Camp Welfare Committees) in the various states and in the countries of France, Great Britain, Holland, and Switzerland from 1914 to 1918. 

Gottschalk’s 1980s update on Christian Science admits to seeing controversy on three fronts: intensified opposition from conservative Christians, the arrested development of open exchange between Christian Scientists and mainline Protestants, and a lack of honest confrontation necessary to address the controversies and dissonance within the Church.