Annotations Related to Radical Reliance

In this book of personal essays, people representing a variety of faiths respond to questions about the Covid pandemic and its impact on their spiritual practice. Susan Searle writes from a Christian Scientist viewpoint, and explains that she accepted vaccination in order to continue her public ministry. 

Shirley Paulson responds to questions about the Covid pandemic and its impact on the practice of her faith, Christian Science. She discusses how the pandemic experience highlighted the need for greater maturity in spiritual healing practices, such as more concern for public issues and greater spiritual clarity, strength, and authority.

Due to the long-standing debate over Mary Baker Eddy’s use of morphine, the Mary Baker Eddy Library sought to resolve it in order to restore focus on Eddy’s larger record. Calvin Frye’s diaries had recorded several instances of Eddy’s use of morphine, but some claimed his diaries had been altered. A forensic analysis in 2021 concluded the diaries are reliable.

The derivation of psychotherapy is examined through the contributions of 19th-century American mind-cure movements and personalities such as Swedenborgianism, spiritualism, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Warren Felt Evans, New Thought, Christian Science, and the Emmanuel Movement. These movements’ focus on the connection between the healer and sufferer made them precursors of contemporary psychotherapy’s relation-based methods.

Henniker-Heaton’s meaningful life and Christian Science healing of ten years of paralysis are accompanied by selections from his poetry and other writings. The book’s purpose is to “present the spiritual ideas of this prolific writer in chronological order, setting them in the context of his life.”

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.

Eddy’s first published reference to the subject of vaccination was in an 1880 sermon. In 1900, Eddy was consulted by some Christian Science parents, including her son, who wanted to keep their children from school due to their opposition to vaccination laws. But Eddy recommended compliance with the law and affirmed that one could also submit to the providence of God. 

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.

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.

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. 

Fraser, a harsh critic of Christian Science, focuses on the history of its health practices in relation to the development of Western medicine. Eddy “left a movement that American society found simultaneously appealing (in its emphasis on Emersonian self-reliance) and troubling (for its wholesale rejection of medicine).”

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.

Manca concludes from his research in one region in Canada that although many critics of Christian Science see it as a cult creating a psychological environment that tolerates only obedience, he has found that the healthcare choices made by Christian Scientists are more diverse than previous studies suggested. Those he interviewed made a wide range of choices.

Ruetenik’s unusual suggestion to establish a ‘Church of Christ, Pragmatist,’ envisions an institution based on a pragmatic practice of Christian Science that does not need to be protected or a doctrine that needs to be defended but as a practice that can be modified. It could function as a midway point between optimism (healing always occurs) and pessimism (healing never occurs).

Greenhouse’s memoir is her sad story of her mother’s death from what might have been medically treatable cancer. Her parents practiced what might be called a ‘radical reliance’ form of Christian Science, the religion that Lucia admittedly never understood or adopted. Fearing “mental malpractice” (the teaching that negative thoughts of others can be harmful), her parents kept the illness a painful secret.

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.

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.

This 2005 self-published memoir offers readers unfamiliar with the daily life and mindset of a Christian Scientist a firsthand account. The book is not heavily laden with religious teachings, but the author makes clear her routine application of basic Christian Science teachings to the challenges in her life, including her healthcare choices.

Baxter cites a century of mostly unwarranted publicity against the Christian Science Church, but feels some objections raised by the press clearly need examining. In particular, she addresses the Church’s singular focus on healing and promotes a healthy self-examination that should break the silence around failures. Sensible church policy and intelligent engagement with the public would help the Church to progress.

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.

Fraser admits her delight in counting the Christian Science churches closing their doors. Her carefully researched and well-written story of her experience with Christian Science documents the reasons for her anger. She blames the Church for its promotion of a type of radical reliance on God’s power to heal that was impractical and caused unnecessary suffering.

Asser and Swan “evaluate deaths of children from families in which faith healing was practiced in lieu of medical care and to determine if such deaths were preventable.” They studied death records from 1975 through 1995, but dismissed published accounts of healed organic and functional diseases for children in Christian Science as “not [having] been confirmed by scientifically valid measures.”

Wilson’s memoirs recount her 1950s childhood with Christian Science and the tragedy of her mother’s illness and death due to cancer. Wilson never expected Christian Science or medicine to solve her mother’s problems, but the deeper philosophical questions generated by her experience with Christian Science stayed with her. Rather than ‘rose-colored’ windows, she admits she is more readily drawn to ‘blue windows.’

May approached the subject of medical authority and Christian Scientists’ opposition to medical treatment from a philosophical perspective. A consensus may not be possible, but May identifies at least one way both could reconsider their currently entrenched positions. 

The authors summarized six cases in the 1980s in which parents were prosecuted for not providing medical care for their children who died under Christian Science treatment. They found ambiguity in state and federal laws, as well as in the Christian Science Church’s claim that the decision to use Christian Science treatment was individual, leaving parents unsupported and vulnerable.