Resources Published between 1981 and 2000

Schoepflin includes short sections on the Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons and Christian Scientists, seeing them as movements which used science as a “tool for apologetics.” He shows how Mary Baker Eddy combined the tools of science (reason and empiricism—in the evidence of bodily healing) with “the spiritual and immaterial dimensions of Christianity” (311).

Michell examines in detail the remarkable similarities where the unorthodox theologies of Julian of Norwich (14th century) and Eddy (19th century) converge. Both women struggled with serious illness and near-death experiences which became the basis for profound revelation and healing.  Eddy understood God as mother, and Julian’s vision of Jesus as mother reflected on the kindness and gentleness of God.

​​Dunlap’s dissertation is a rhetorical analysis focused on Mary Baker Eddy’s 19th-century life and writings. She examines Eddy’s opponents’ reactions to her intrusion into 19th-century science, theology, and medicine. She also explores the resonance between Eddy’s language about spiritual reality and the metaphysical language of contemporary quantum physics—what brings the seen and the unseen into relation with each other.

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.

Jenkins argues that the cult problem of today is the product of cultural and political work and that Christian Science, with associated mind-cure movements, has been the primary target of cult critics. He joins the attacks by asserting (falsely): “Most pernicious, Christian Science denied the Virgin Birth, the miracles of Christ, the Atonement, and the Resurrection.” (60)  

The purpose of this research was to determine whether Christian Scientists report more or less illness than those not practicing Christian Science. The survey indicates that both groups use conventional and unconventional medicine. But, despite the lesser practice of healthy lifestyles among Christian Scientists, Christian Scientists reported having fewer medical illnesses and greater satisfaction with life than non-Christian Scientists.

Wood highlights the role of Horton Foote’s faith tradition in his professional work as a highly acclaimed playwright who won a Pulitzer Prize (The Young Man from Atlanta) and Academy Awards for screenwriter (To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies). Wood explains both the theology and practice of Christian Science (especially that of Foote’s loving and nurturing mother) that show through in his writing.

Singelenberg, a social anthropologist, argued that Rodney Stark’s then-recent analysis of the ‘rise and fall’ of Christian Science overlooked two important issues that may have had a bearing on his conclusions: the Knapp Controversy, and rapid loss of financial stability due to an ambitious attempt to build a media empire.

In a time when science and medicine were intent on removing religion from their midst, both Eddy and White actively integrated physical and spiritual concerns in their theology and practice. Although Eddy named her religion Christian Science, logically claiming that its principles could be demonstrated with mathematical certainty, White’s claim to authority was validated by her public visions with signs following.

Piepmeier studies five women, including Mary Baker Eddy, as examples in 19th-century America of the ‘outing’ of women’s bodies in the public sphere in ways not easily categorized. They had to address the powerful ideologies of domesticity and sentimentality to distinguish their own ideologies. Eddy’s textbook was a rewriting of major discourses, representing a significant rethinking of women’s roles and rights.

Bednarowski explores themes of healing in the theological work of women since Mary Baker Eddy, whose quest for healing served as an entry into the construction of an entire religious worldview. Following Eddy’s accident from a fall, a moment of insight into the nature of reality sparked the emergence of her textbook, theology, healing method, and church.

With free access to the private papers of Richard Strout, The Christian Science Monitor reporter who covered the McCarthy subcommittee hearings of 1950-54, the author Lawrence Strout, a distant relative of Richard Strout, seeks to get inside the Monitor’s internal debates and decision-making at a time of blacklists, ‘red-baiting’ and the equating of liberalism with socialism and communism.

Both Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science movement and the New Thought Movement flourished in the late 19th-and early 20th-centuries. They agreed that one’s mental fears foster illness and distress. Yet unlike the New Thought Movement—believing in the human mind’s ability to control the world—Eddy thought a reliance on the mortal mind’s power distracted from one’s reliance on God.

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.

Fraser admits her delight in counting the Christian Science churches closing their doors. Her carefully researched and well-written story of her experience with Christian Science documents the reasons for her anger. She blames the Church for its promotion of a type of radical reliance on God’s power to heal that was impractical and caused unnecessary suffering.

The monumental bank-style church buildings associated with Christian Science are the subject of Ivey’s architectural study. Ivey notes a self-conscious attitude about this church building movement seeking to be perceived as prominent, legitimate and profitable to the worshiper. His treatment of Eddy and Christian Science teachings is balanced, but he questions whether the church buildings appropriately represented Eddy’s church and teachings.

This book is the culmination of a conversation between the three authors in the Journal of Social Philosophy and the Hastings Center Report. They explore the relationship between Christian Scientists and secularized, medically oriented, broader society about the conflicts over medical and religious healing practices. They examine, for example, whether the Christian Science church is ethically irresponsible for influencing its members.

Grekel’s stated goal for her trilogy on Mary Baker Eddy is to learn her holy history. She opens the first biography with the Matthew and Luke Gospel accounts of Jesus’s birth, demonstrating parallels between Jesus and young Mary Baker. Thoreau plays the role of John the Baptist. Examples of comparisons with Jesus are intended as evidence of Eddy’s holiness.

Alice Clark, a British suffragist and historian of women, was influenced by her later affiliation with Christian Science.  In Christian Science, Clark found a synthesis of her Quaker belief in the ‘Light within’ with a gender identity that rejected dominance in a male-governed world of the power of reason and the corresponding value of the feminine for impacting world affairs.

Historian Benowitz’s encyclopedia profile of Augusta Stetson is a chronology of her life from devout Methodist upbringing, to public orator, to Eddy’s request for her to establish Christian Science in New York City, to her increasingly problematic leadership and eventual excommunication from Eddy’s Church.

Asser and Swan “evaluate deaths of children from families in which faith healing was practiced in lieu of medical care and to determine if such deaths were preventable.” They studied death records from 1975 through 1995, but dismissed published accounts of healed organic and functional diseases for children in Christian Science as “not [having] been confirmed by scientifically valid measures.”

Schrager finds commonality between Eddy’s theological/therapeutic movement and Twain’s mental telegraphy. Both sought legitimacy by associating their convictions with the newly professionalizing discourse of science. But Twain was threatened by Eddy’s transgression of 19th-century female norms and monopoly of religious interpretation; and Eddy’s integrity of womanhood was threatened, if not seduced, by the aggressive masculinity of mesmerist and physician.

Historian Benowitz’s encyclopedia profile of Mary Baker Eddy is a chronology of her life: her childhood and early marriage and widowhood; her desperate attempts to find healing; her early struggles to establish herself; the publication of her textbook, Science and Health, in 1875; the tumultuous beginnings of her Church characterized by lawsuits and disenchanted students; establishing The Christian Science Monitor.

Jasen claims that when Christian Science was introduced in Canada, it provoked controversy of wide significance on subjects like the mind/body connection, faith and healing, and the hegemony of the medical profession. Because it effected marvelous cures, it couldn’t be dismissed. But it challenged the authority of physicians and clerics, making them consider issues that seldom intruded upon their separate spheres.

LaMothe highlights the famous dancer Ruth St. Denis and how she found theological meaning in her dance informed mainly by Christian Science and some other religious influences, including Isis. Understanding dance as an expression of divine Mind, St. Denis struggled to justify her love of the physical expression of dance in light of Mary Baker Eddy’s teaching that matter was illusion.