Annotations Related to Spirituality

Cooling examines the role, meaning and contemporary relevance of spiritual healing as found in the New Testament gospels, the writings of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, and the practices of Christian Scientists and Pentecostals today. She explores the elements that constitute Christian healing, and the different means of healing such as the laying on of hands, the anointing of oil and prayer.

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.

The practice of Communion in The Mother Church would come to differ from that in the Christian Science branch churches. Due to the excessive popularity of Communion services in The Mother Church, in 1908 Mary Baker Eddy ceased the practice out of concern that it was becoming too social an event. However, Communion services continued in the branch churches.

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.

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.”

Peidle finds common ground between Christian Science and Vedanta (represented by Swami Vivekananda), by examining a speech written by Mary Baker Eddy for the 1893 Parliament of World Religions, as well as her other writings, and Vivekananda’s correspondence. Vivekananda first learned about Christian Science at the Parliament. His later ill health prompted an interest in the nature of healing and reality.

Booth seeks correlations between the field of Organizational Development, quantum physics, and Christian Science, with the intent of determining how the principles and practices of Christian Science, in sync with quantum physics, might align with, and be a resource for, business challenges. The thesis is based on interviews with fifteen Christian Scientists about their experience relating their theology to their business practices.

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.”

Taffel imparts how his Christian Science faith gave meaning and purpose to his turbulent journey as a gay youth navigating his way into adulthood. He would discover his spiritual identity and the reassurance of God’s love and protection. The article illustrates the spiritual ideas and values that fortified Taffel’s path to genuine self-worth, honesty and living his truth.

Zamparutti claims that Mary Baker Eddy employs Plato’s dialectical method (defining terms by reference to their opposite) to transform the Platonic idea of ‘substance’ into a spiritual principle, God. From Platonist assumptions, Eddy re-conceives substance as the one immaterial Spirit. Burke, as an agnostic, developed his philosophy of language by converting some of Eddy’s ideas learned in childhood, to secular usage.

Petersen has made a paraphrase revision of Mary Baker Eddy’s 19th-century textbook, Science and Health, with the purpose of elucidating divine Science for the 21st century. In her Preface she avows her great efforts to keep Eddy’s original meaning of divine Science intact, while using more current (and inclusive) language and illustrations, and quoting from modern Bible versions.

Artist Ben Nicholson credits Christian Science as a formative influence on his desire to express art beyond the visible world into a hidden structure of reality focused on ideas. Nicholson also intended his art to incite social change by fostering a state of mind that is spiritually constructive rather than materially destructive.

Introvigne reviews 19th- and 20th-century artists to understand how their Christian Science beliefs and convictions influenced and inspired their art. James Franklin Gilman, Violet Oakley, Evelyn Dunbar, Winifred Nicholson, the ‘Group of Seven,’ and James Cornell are featured artists in this review. Cornell, considered by Introvigne as the most important, was famous for his collages and ‘boxes.’

Lobl, the UK/Ireland representative for Christian Science, notes that in spite of the abundance of research on the connection between spirituality and health, he sees a need to widen the sphere of public concern so that policies reflect the growing numbers of people who value spirituality in the realm of healthcare. A case study is included.

This beautifully crafted book is essentially a compilation of the writings of Stephen R. Howard, who served as director-curator of Longyear Museum from 1997 to 2014. (The museum is an independent historical institution dedicated to the understanding of Mary Baker Eddy’s life and work.) Nearly every page includes multiple photographs, facsimiles, artwork, Illustrations and portraits representing the holdings of the museum.

Feminist scholarship will benefit from this research on Eddy’s relation to the suffragist movement and why the chapter ‘Marriage’ is placed in an early, prominent position in Science and Health. Eddy had stated that Science and Health had ‘crossed swords with the free love’ as embraced by Spiritualists and Revivalists, even as they were drawn to Christian Science because of its radical departure from the patriarchal church.

The Society of Jewish Science was a response to the mass conversion of Jews, particularly women, to Christian Science. Its purpose was to revive a growing secular Judaism with elements Lichtenstein feared had been lost: healing, personal prayer, and belief in the Divine Spirit within. Unlike Christian Science, the Society did not reject medicine or deny the reality of matter.

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.

Robert Indiana, a preeminent American artist of the 20th century, is most widely known for his 1966 painting “LOVE,” which embodies the four capital letters stacked foursquare. Thomas explores the “connections to mysticism, religion and spirituality” in Indiana’s life. In particular, Thomas adduces several points of congruence between the doctrines of Christian Science and Indiana’s art.

Bessette analyzes the historical milieu that resulted in the late Victorian era’s “birth of the therapeutic.” Besides Mary Baker Eddy, Bessette taps into the various social, religious and psychosomatic thinkers of this period along with the New Thought and Emmanuel movements, and how they shaped a more unified “whole man” view of mind and body.

​​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.

Unlike the first volume in this Expanded Version of the We Knew Mary Baker Eddy series, this second volume includes all new material unavailable in the original series of four volumes by the same title. These self-selected writers were workers who held great admiration for Eddy, but several also acknowledged Eddy’s severe expectations for those who served her.

Voorhees explains that Eddy never intended to become a role model for gender parity, but it emerged naturally as a by-product of her larger purpose and project of revealing the nature of Christian salvation. In contrast to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Voorhees illustrates how the ‘Woman Question’ for Eddy is emphatic and radical, yet qualified and ultimately subsumed by her soteriology.

​​This first volume (of two), of the expanded version of a series of reminiscences from those who knew Eddy personally and worked closely with her, represents a segment of the Christian Science community that was profoundly committed to ‘the Cause.’  They wanted to serve Eddy, their Leader (whom they called ‘Mother’) unselfishly and faithfully, and they clearly revered her.

Armstrong claims that Cornell infused elements of a Christian Science worldview, including the denial of the substantiality of matter, into his art. Also poet/novelist Loy, a close friend of Cornell’s, read Eddy, and infused ideas traceable to Christian Science into her poetry, fiction and correspondence with Cornell. They both grappled with the notion that by embracing Mind, material error would dissolve.