Annotations Related to Youth

Frederick documents Eddy’s diverse childhood education and touches on broader issues in the education of girls in early America. Eddy’s home was full of newspapers and many educated visitors and ministers. She was tutored by a brother who graduated from Dartmouth, and at age twenty, Eddy was enrolled in Sanbornton Academy where she studied natural philosophy, chemistry, rhetoric and logic.

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. 

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. 

Although written for young readers, “A World More Bright” contains details for those interested in the personal side of Mary Baker Eddy’s life story. For those more familiar with other biographies on Eddy, this book offers new facts that may be useful for filling in gaps of historical interest. Typical biographical controversies are mentioned but not critiqued by the authors.

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.

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.

​​To aid scholars interested in researching primary source materials on the life of Mary Baker Eddy, the Mary Baker Eddy Library provides a summary of its vast holdings, including approximately 20,000 letters, articles, sermons, and other manuscript materials written by Eddy, nearly 8,000 letters written by her secretaries on her behalf, letters by approximately 7,000 different correspondents, and over 800 reminiscences.

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.

This book grew out of Craig’s 1970s dissertation on the Bernard Maybeck architecture at Principia—a college for Christian Scientists in Illinois. Craig contextualizes Maybeck within late-19th- to mid-20th-century architecture, and highlights the values Maybeck shared with the Principia community, especially seeing the project as the unfoldment of Principle–embodied in the College’s very name.

This large anthology of primary and secondary sources is of great value to scholars because it was published in conjunction with the 2002 opening of the Church archives in the new Mary Baker Eddy Library. Some sections provide material not readily available in other published works, such as early family letters and images and transcriptions of pages from Eddy’s Bibles.

This article addresses the relationship between the practice of biomedicine and religious beliefs and practices related to children. Christian Scientists are mentioned only in the context of describing the tension between clinicians and faith healers in general. But the article is relevant because of its acknowledgment of both the benefits and challenges to society and to families who practice spiritual healing.

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.’

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.

Bundy examines the historical record of Mary Baker Eddy’s formative years including her birthplace in Bow, New Hampshire, and her family. A special focus is Eddy’s father, Mark Baker, a leading citizen of Bow who is described as both a strict Puritan, but also charitable and kind.

“Discovery” is the first in a three-volume biography of Mary Baker Eddy by Peel, a literary critic, counter-intelligence officer, and editorial consultant to the Christian Science Church. Striving for a straightforward account, without apologetics or polemics, Peel examines Eddy’s intellectual and spiritual path of discovery, from her life of obscurity and loss to her search for health and spiritual breakthrough.

This is a collection of writings by Mary Kimball Morgan, founder of The Principia, a school for Christian Scientists (Pre-K through college). Recognizing the important responsibilities and possibilities of youth education, Morgan wrote these practical, spiritually-based insights from a well of deep wisdom, based on fundamental principles and adherence to morality and ethics. Their wisdom is of educational and character-development value.

This book constitutes Beasley’s response to requests from readers of his first book, The Cross and the Crown, for the history of the Christian Science movement from 1910 to the book’s 1956 publication. Not a Christian Scientist himself, he made good use of public documents covering the controversial ‘Great Litigation,’ court cases on health-laws, as well as successful church programs.

Organized around Principia’s symbolic sheaf of wheat, As the Sowing is a history of The Principia, a school for young Christian Scientists, from its beginnings (Seedtime) as an idea of Mary Kimball Morgan in the late 1890s through the Golden Anniversary years of 1947-48 (Years of Reaping). The ‘good seed’ underlying the foundation and unfoldment of the school is to serve the cause of Christian Science.

The War Relief Committee was established by The Mother Church in Boston in 1914 after the outbreak of WWI to relieve families and individuals who were adversely affected by the war. This book is a report of those activities by individuals and groups (Camp Welfare Committees) in the various states and in the countries of France, Great Britain, Holland, and Switzerland from 1914 to 1918. 

This work of fiction provides historians a valuable resource for understanding the application of the new teachings and practice of Christian Science as it was understood in the early years after Eddy’s death. The heroine’s thought-process expresses an early 20th-century application of the new Science in relation to sexual morality, character weaknesses, and physical ailments.