Resources Discussing Ursula Gestefeld

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.

Horowitz assigns Christian Science a prominent place in the development of American affirmative-thinking (his term) philosophical systems. Although he acknowledges Mary Baker Eddy’s interest in Quimby (a 19th-century mesmerist) and her debt to him during a prolonged time of illness, Horowitz believes that Quimby was not the founder of Christian Science. Instead, Eddy herself created a brigade of spiritual freethinkers.

The commonly mischaracterized and consequently overlooked relationship between Eddy and her former student, Gestefeld, should be re-examined because of its rich theological and biographical potential. Voorhees’s closer look at their correspondence indicates a mutually respectful relationship before they parted ways on grounds of theological differences—Gestefeld’s theosophical eclecticism versus Eddy’s unorthodox Christian particularism, and not because of Eddy’s authoritarian reasons.

Seeing no social change favoring women’s rights, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton switched her energies to addressing the underlying issue of women’s subordination rooted in the Bible. Like Mary Baker Eddy’s opus, Science and Health, Stanton’s Women’s Bible was intended as a vehicle for emancipation. Kern includes Eddy among the many women bearing (indirect) influence on Stanton’s story.

Williams presents a history of the evolution of the Christian Science hymnal from its 1892 first edition through to its 1932 sixth edition which contained 143 new hymns. He highlights key contributors to each edition and examines the changes made in tune and lyrics, often to bring them in conformity with Christian Science concepts.

This 1930 biography on Mary Baker Eddy appears in this contemporary bibliography because of its role in Christian Science history. Without access to church archives and drawing on others who discredited her, Dakin’s biography reads like a conspiracy theory against Eddy. An important comparison can be made between Dakin’s and Lyman Powell’s biographies of the same year. 

Gestefeld had been an adoring student of Mary Baker Eddy’s until she felt ready to extend her own ideas beyond her teacher. She thought of herself as evidence of the natural progression of what Christian Science should be. But she opposed Eddy’s strict boundaries, and the trajectory of Gestefeld’s writing moved toward eclectic views, contrary to Eddy’s particularism.