Annotations Related to Testimony

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 Mary Baker Eddy Library examines Eddy’s correspondence and documents related to the 1881 chartering, development and fruition of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. The College, an institution meant to teach Eddy’s metaphysical healing method, accepted both sexes regardless of age or gender. Eddy intended her students to practice what they learned back in their own communities.

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.

Mary Baker Eddy’s approach to the weather is the topic of research, including stories of how threatening weather and the laws of nature were made subordinate to God’s divine law. One student of Eddy’s explains how she instructed them not to try to control the weather. Rather, their prayers were to affirm that God, not outside influences, governs the weather.

This article features the records and testimony of Christian Scientists held in the Japanese Stanley Internment Camp of captured Hong Kong civilians during World War II. It covers their primary concern of getting enough food, and their resourcefulness in holding their own services in spite of the lack of access to hymnals and current issues of the Christian Science Quarterly.

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.”

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.

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.

The Oconto, Wisconsin Christian Science Church was built in 1886, the first Christian Science church in the world. Lewis, a media representative for Christian Science, commemorates its continuing services over the past 130 years, as well as its place in the National Register of Historic Places. She documents the church’s beginnings and gives a brief biography of Mary Baker Eddy.

Stob is interested in the rhetoric used by early Christian Science lecturers, who were active during the American Progressive Era, to convince the public that Christian Science was worth investigating. These lectures effectively used novel language that expands the parameters of revelatory discourse. Eddy and her lecturers moved divine revelation from an other-worldly mystery into a framework for individual agency.

This essay by an adherent of Christian Science accompanies the main article on Christian Science. Paulson describes her childhood experience and how her religious practice was her primary source of comfort and healing. She recognizes distinctions between Christian Science and orthodox Christianity and explains why she thinks the typical orthodox view of Christian Science’s similarity with Gnosticism is misleading. 

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. 

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.

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.

As a health communication researcher, Kline focuses this study on Christian Science for several reasons, including the use of health testimonies for examining how prayer affects health, and learning how people communicate about spirituality in their healthcare. Six themes emerged from Kline’s research on testimonials published in Christian Science periodicals in 2008 and 2009, reflecting three general interactive processes involving spirituality and health.

​​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.

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.

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.

Waldschmidt-Nelson meticulously presents, in German, the history and status of Christian Science in Germany from its beginnings to the present. It is based on a documented examination of historical records, published and unpublished writings ranging from panegyrical to dismissive, interviews and correspondence with representatives of the Christian Science church, the medical profession and the Christian clergy (both Protestant and Roman Catholic), and conversations with private individuals.

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.

This second edition of “Mr. Dickey: Secretary” includes the same biographical information on Mary Baker Eddy as the first edition. But the second half of the book replaces Dickey’s ‘Memoirs’ with his ‘Chestnut Hill Album’—Dickey’s journals found after Baxter’s first edition. This collection highlights the agonizing challenges Eddy faced and the way she chose to deal with them.

Ivey chronicles the late 19th century expansion of both New Thought and Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science church in the Midwest: the graduates of Eddy’s Massachusetts Metaphysical College who established institutes in six Midwest cities, the most important early organizers of Christian Science services, the establishment of The Principia as an independent school, and New Thought’s Emma Curtis Hopkins many organizers.

Mary Baker Eddy wanted Dickey to write her biography, having rejected other biographical attempts as either too shallow or hostile. This book first consists of Baxter’s analysis of Dickey and his role as Eddy’s helper in her last years, and his own leadership role after her death in 1910. The latter half consists of Dickey’s memoirs which Eddy requested.