In 1953, Anglican church leaders created a commission of clergy and doctors seeking a clearer understanding of divine healing, its role in their ministry, and their relationship with medical practitioners. The final report grounded it in the medical sciences and found little common ground between spiritual healing and the Anglican Church’s embedding of its healing ministry in the ritual and creed of the Church.
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47 Results
“Have Any Native Americans Been Christian Scientists?” (2022)
This research on Native American affiliation with Christian Science highlights Tsianina Blackstone, a Native American singer, who later became a Christian Science practitioner for four decades. It also includes links to the church periodicals where one can find Native American healing testimonies, how Native Americans were blessed by Christian Science literature, and Christian Science evangelizing work on reservations.
View Annotation“Marietta Webb” (2020)
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.
View Annotation“Martha Matilda Harper” (2020)
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.
View Annotation“Christian Science and African Americans: A New Discovery of Early Healing” (2019)
The Mary Baker Eddy Library discovered letters to Eddy from student Lucinda Reeves detailing accounts of the healing of Black Americans. Reeves first healed a Black American family and later two other patients. These accounts of healing are significant because they show that Black Americans had encounters with Christian Science earlier than previously thought.
View Annotation“‘God is My First Aid Kit’: Negotiation of Health and Illness among Christian Scientists” (2018)
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.
View Annotation“Lulu Knight” (2017)
After joining the Christian Science church in 1912 and becoming a Journal-listed healing practitioner in 1930, Lulu M. Knight became the first Black American to receive the degree of C.S.B which allowed her to teach her own annual class on Christian Science. Knight was a celebrated Christian Scientist who contributed greatly to Christian Science healing in Chicago.
View Annotation“Christian Science’s faith healing practice in the United States and Canada: an overview from a historical and legal perspective” (2015)
Issaoui questions the limits of the legal accommodations that allow Christian Science practitioners and/or parents to rely on spiritual means in treating Christian Scientists. By examining specific cases, she concludes the key issue is finding a balance between the religious right to practice Christian Science healing and the State’s responsibility to prevent child endangerment.
View AnnotationPerfect Peril: Christian Science and Mind Control (2015)
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.
View Annotation“Church of Christ, Scientist: History, Beliefs, Practices” (2014)
This essay on Christian Science is one of many descriptive introductions of various religions and their relation to evangelical Christianity. Simmons notes that the ‘Christian’ element in Christian Science involves a radical reinterpretation of Jesus and his role in the New Testament. Mary Baker Eddy stressed the practical nature of her ‘science’ in human challenges, thus highlighting the focus on healing.
View Annotation“Seekers of the Light”: Christian Scientists in the United States, 1890-1910 (2011)
Examining 32 branch church membership records, plus 800 testimonies of healing, between 1890-1910, Swensen provides a demographic history of the occupations, classes, and motivations of Christian Scientists across the country. Compared to the 1910 census, Swensen found five times more professionals in the branches and almost four times the managers/proprietors, but only one fifth the number of unskilled workers and farmers.
View Annotation“A Metaphysical Rocket in Gotham: The Rise of Christian Science in New York City, 1885-1910” (2010)
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.
View Annotation“What More in the Name of God? Theologies and Theodicies of Faith Healing” (2010)
Campbell seeks to identify and critique three central issues concerning communities who practice Christian healing without medicine: their theological justification for such healing practices, medical practices as morally and metaphysically wrong from their perspectives, and their understanding of theodicy when healing does not occur. But a glaring problem for researchers of Christian Science is Campbell’s lack of distinction between groups.
View AnnotationPaths of Pioneer Christian Scientists (2010)
Four women— Emma and Abigail Dyer (daughter of Emma) Thompson, Janette Weller, and Annie M. Knott—were selected as representative of the pioneering work of early Christian Scientists due not to their gender, but to the available historical evidence, the range of their contributions to the history of Christian Science, and the relative familiarity of that person among today’s Christian Scientists.
View AnnotationMary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer (Amplified Version) (2009)
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.
View Annotation“‘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” (2008)
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.
View AnnotationFive Smooth Stones: Our Power To Heal Without Medicine Through The Science Of Prayer (2008)
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.
View AnnotationA Journey into Prayer: Pioneers of Prayer in the Laboratory; Agents of Science or Satan? (2007)
Sweet’s firsthand account of the lives and work of Bruce and his son John Klingbeil describes their organization, Spindrift, and their deep involvement with Christian Science. Spindrift’s scientific experiments with prayer for plants, attempted to prove that prayer works, but their struggles with public rejection and excommunication from the Church until their double suicide in 1993 plagued them until the end.
View Annotation“Textual Healing: Mainstream Protestants and the Therapeutic Text, 1900–1925” (2006)
The focus of Klassen’s study is the healing practice of mainstream Christians in the US and Canada during the early 20th century. She argues that it was unabashedly medicalized and modern and was supported by the therapeutic role of written texts. Christian Science enters the discussion as a perceived opponent with its innovative reading of biblical texts.
View Annotation“A State of Unrest and Division: Christian Science in Oregon, 1890-1910” (2005)
Rolf Swensen, a social sciences bibliographer, describes the troubled early stages of the Christian Science movement in Portland under the leadership of two influential women, Blanche Hogue and Amorette Aldrich, and the churches they established. The source of contention appears to have been due to Hogue’s affiliation with and support from Augusta Stetson, a prominent Christian Science practitioner and teacher in New York City.
View Annotation“‘Our Cause . . . Does Not Need Advertising, but Protection’: The Christian Science Movement Regroups, 1908–1910” (2004)
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.
View AnnotationThe Onward and Upward Chain: Pioneers of Christian Science in the 1880s (2004)
This historically valuable documentary recounts the story of the earliest growth of Christian Science in the Midwestern US of the 1880s. The story includes many significant healings that turned patients into students of Christian Science. Despite severe persecution and ridicule, they also healed others. These pioneers represented all walks of life—farmers, businessmen, housewives, clerks, simple and sophisticated.
View Annotation“Pilgrims at the Golden Gate: Christian Scientists on the Pacific Coast, 1880–1915.” (2003)
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
View AnnotationChristian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America (2003)
Schoepflin’s book contains a detailed analysis of the late 19th-century legislative and legal confrontations between Christian Scientists and the medical community, demonstrating the shifting relationship between medical practitioners, Christian Science practitioners, and the public. From medical licensing, the meaning of medical practice, and the rights of Americans to therapeutic choice, the public debate turned to matters of contagious disease, public safety and children’s rights.
View Annotation“New Thinking, New Thought, New Age: The Theology and Influence of Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849-1925)” (2002)
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.
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