Resources Discussing Mary Baker Eddy

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.

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.

Mary Baker Eddy’s support for the emancipation of slaves in the confederate states is shown through her correspondence with Union Army generals Benjamin Butler and John Fremont in their efforts and support of the emancipation of slaves. Along with regular correspondence, Eddy took initiative and drafted a petition in support of the Emancipation Proclamation.

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.

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.

Christian Scientists from Chicago would convince a skeptical Mary Baker Eddy to participate in the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions with its message of unity among all religions. Although the address was enthusiastically received, its overall negative impact was the association of Christian Science with theosophy and Vedanta, and the crystalizing of opposition from the more traditional Christian Churches.

Mary Baker Patterson [Eddy] responded to newspaper accounts of the courage and wisdom of the Union Army General, Benjamin F. Butler. As commander of the fort where three enslaved men sought refuge, Butler’s defense became a foundation for legal freedom for slaves. Eddy’s letter to Butler sheds light on her anti-slavery convictions and willingness to advocate for them. 

Countess Dorothy von Moltke was a devoted Christian Scientist and strong advocate for the German translation of Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook Science and Health. Throughout her life, she worked to make Christian Science more accessible to German-speaking followers by providing English lessons and by serving on the translation committee that ultimately completed the first foreign language translation of Science and Health.

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.

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.

Swensen documents how, in the fifteen years after the passing of Mary Baker Eddy (1910-1925), the Christian Science Board of Directors consolidated and centralized their authority both at Church headquarters and over local branch churches. Mirroring a corporate business model, church organization, administration, and standardization were merged with obedience and loyalty. 

The objective of Armer’s study of Mary Baker Eddy’s establishment of her Massachusetts Metaphysical College is to highlight the achievements of women pioneers in higher education and entrepreneurial successes. Characteristics of Eddy’s business success included taking risk, managerial skills, knowledge of the product and the market, financial resources to produce capital, and enough success to produce profits.

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.

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. 

Eder finds in Mary Baker Eddy’s writings about masculinity that Christian Science could not be practiced only as an ethereal form of religion (caricatured as a woman) but reflect “a discernible and repeated thrust to extend the reach of Christian Science thought and practice beyond the sheltered sphere of nineteenth-century feminine religiosity into the proving grounds of the public realm.”

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.

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.

Luey structures her portrayal of eight famous residents of Massachusetts, including Mary Baker Eddy, around their famous homes. She covers Eddy’s childhood in Bow and Tilton homes; her struggles with poverty and illness in North Groton and renting rooms in various boarding houses; her first purchased home in Lynn, and her last two homes: Pleasant View in Concord, NH and Chestnut Hill in Boston.

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.

This chapter, written by the Church, provides information that will help health care providers understand the spiritual needs of Christian Scientists in a practical, clinical setting. Besides a background history of Mary Baker Eddy, the formation of the Church, and its foundational teachings, the chapter explains reliance on prayer for healing as an individual choice, and the adherence to law when it comes to infectious diseases.

Reesman details many parallels between Mark Twain’s troubled later life and his one-dimensional literary portrayals of both Joan of Arc and Mary Baker Eddy. Both were visionaries. Joan’s voice in her trial record is consistent, but Eddy was delusional. Eddy uses her mentor, Quimby’s, words for her own profit. Both of Twain’s literary portrayals put his own personality on full display.

This comprehensive 80-page chronology begins with the birth of Mary Baker Eddy in 1821 and ends with her funeral in 1910. In between, it includes the individuals, events, and publications connected to the multifaceted life of Eddy. The scholar can also tap into the Chronology’s extensive footnoting for source material.

Swensen examines the initial flock and organization of the Church Mary Baker Eddy founded and then disbanded ten years later. The early 1880s brought new members and stability, spurring Eddy to organize. But this embattled precursor of today’s Mother Church would be irredeemably challenged by a volatile membership, unreliable preaching by invited clergy, and confusion over competing metaphysical groups.

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.

Eddy spent her last three years living in a grand residence outside of Boston. This well-referenced book details her life and the lives of her loyal household— a family of workers who came to support Eddy and the Cause of Christian Science. Frederick references staff diaries and written reminiscences to highlight qualities brought to their tasks, blessings received, and lessons learned.