Resources Discussing William James

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.

Ruetenik’s unusual suggestion to establish a ‘Church of Christ, Pragmatist,’ envisions an institution based on a pragmatic practice of Christian Science that does not need to be protected or a doctrine that needs to be defended but as a practice that can be modified. It could function as a midway point between optimism (healing always occurs) and pessimism (healing never occurs).

Nenneman’s interest in Christian Science was due not to its healing message, but to Mary Baker Eddy’s deep spirituality and theological answers regarding the nature of God and Jesus’s mission. He profiles the great thinkers who wrestled with similar visions of reality as Eddy: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures and Christian New Testament, and those found in the flourishing exchange between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages. 

This well-researched biography of Emma Curtis Hopkins, little-known founder of the 19th-century New Thought movement, includes Hopkins’s early-stage affiliation with Mary Baker Eddy—her tutelage by Eddy and editorship of The Christian Science Journal for 13 months before being suddenly discharged. Harley draws on a range of scholarship to contextualize the complexity of this knotty developmental stage of Christian Science.

Taves’s work is a study of religious experience with a focus on the difference between the indwelling Spirit of God and a lively imagination. Although Mary Baker Eddy was a patient and student of Phineas Quimby’s, Taves identifies the crucial distinction between them through Eddy’s differentiation of spirit from matter. Quimby valued both states simultaneously whereas Eddy held them in complete opposition.

Meyer’s purpose was to assess religion as therapy: as a cult of reassurance, as psychology of peace and positive thinking. After a brief biography of Mary Baker Eddy’s life, Meyer positions Christian Science as a kind of psychotherapy dressed in religious attire —mind cure’s tightly organized, exclusive denomination. However, his perception is based on very few and dated resources.