Annotations Related to Body

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.

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.  

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. 

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.

Stokes argues that Mary Baker Eddy’s human story resembles the plot line of American literary sentimentalism of the 19th century, but she cautions that such sentimental narratives were not as emotionally overwrought as critics have charged. Sentimentalism did not merely trace tragedies but offered readers a protocol for managing agony and loss. It constituted Christian piety as incompatible with body glorification.

​​Squires takes up the 1915 novel, “The Genius,” by Theodore Dreiser and compares the many semi-autobiographical parallels between the novel’s main character, Eugene, and Dreiser. Dreiser’s personal philandering and materialism are reflected in his portrayal of Eugene. After scandalous affairs with tragic consequences, both grapple with their own crisis of morality by conversing with Mary Baker Eddy’s teachings in Christian Science.

Through interviews with twelve Christian Scientists, and accessing the writings of social theorists such as Michel Foucault, Nelson argues that Christian Scientists systematically “reinterpret and rewrite biomedical discourse to reclaim interpretive rights over their bodies and create spiritual connection to other bodies and to God.” She also examines the conflict in identity when a Christian Science adherent chooses biomedical treatment.

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.

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.

Having grown up as a practicing Christian Scientist, Hagerty left the organized religion when she discovered she was more comfortable with medical help. But her experience raised unnerving questions about God, reality, and what she really believed. She concludes that Christian Scientists are more deliberate about pursuing the spiritual law. Its practice places a person in the path of spiritual power.

This biography highlights Mary Baker Eddy as a Christian healer and offers the first comprehensive record of her own healing works. It demonstrates how essential her own practice of Christian healing was to her. Part 1 covers Eddy’s life story with examples of her healing works and editorial comments. Part 2 includes additional healing accounts quoted directly from original sources.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

LaMothe highlights the famous dancer Ruth St. Denis and how she found theological meaning in her dance informed mainly by Christian Science and some other religious influences, including Isis. Understanding dance as an expression of divine Mind, St. Denis struggled to justify her love of the physical expression of dance in light of Mary Baker Eddy’s teaching that matter was illusion.

Poloma seeks to examine empirically the alleged differences between Christian Science and mainline Christian beliefs and practices on a specific topic, namely, spiritual healing. Her methodology includes recorded telephone interviews with 44 Christian Scientists and 95 mainline conservative Christians, all of whom reported having experienced spiritual healing.

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.

Peel, an eminent Christian Science scholar, addresses some challenging 20th-century questions concerning healing the sick through prayer and asserts that the quantitative measurements of science and the qualitative judgments of ethics and religion should no longer be two entirely separate categories. The book contains detailed accounts of medically improbable cures but understood by the patients as ‘healing’ through Christian Science treatment.

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.

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.

​​From her Quaker perspective, Murphy argues that Bible readers ought to suspend criticism against Christian Science long enough to consider Eddy’s logic and healing implications of the Bible.  Murphy finds a parallel to the experience of George Fox in the Christian Science claim that the importance of healing is the light it lets through.