Resources Published between 2001 and 2010

Bibliographer Swensen provides a social profile of the membership, internal operations and founding leadership (Augusta Stetson and Laura Lathrop) of the two largest Christian Science churches in the eastern U.S.—First and Second Church, New York City. Accessing the church records and the extensive correspondence between Mary Baker Eddy and New York church members, Swensen sees his study as a window into the rocket-rise of this vibrant new movement as a whole.

Ivey’s history of Christian Science covers a broad range of topics including a brief history of Eddy’s personal preparation for the founding of the Church, the healing theology of Christian Science, the establishment of the Church, broader contexts of the appeal of Christian Science, the role of language for its expression, the maturing years in the early 20th century, and the challenges of adapting to a changing world in the late 20th century.

Ivey presents historical context for the 19th-century emergence of metaphysical religions and their evolution into the 20th century. He highlights the inter-relationships between the practice of Phineas Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, and the ensuing movements. Ivey differentiates the theology of Christian Science from Quimby and New Thought—with the human mind acting as a conduit between spirit and matter.

This Commission is the city of Boston’s report recommending the Christian Science Publishing Society Center complex as a designated landmark. The Report includes a comprehensive description of the physical site and its uses, history of The Mother Church, history and development of the Fenway neighborhood, the Center’s architectural history and significance, property and zoning issues, the assessed value of the property, etc.

Armstrong claims that Cornell infused elements of a Christian Science worldview, including the denial of the substantiality of matter, into his art. Also poet/novelist Loy, a close friend of Cornell’s, read Eddy, and infused ideas traceable to Christian Science into her poetry, fiction and correspondence with Cornell. They both grappled with the notion that by embracing Mind, material error would dissolve.

Campbell seeks to identify and critique three central issues concerning communities who practice Christian healing without medicine: their theological justification for such healing practices, medical practices as morally and metaphysically wrong from their perspectives, and their understanding of theodicy when healing does not occur. But a glaring problem for researchers of Christian Science is Campbell’s lack of distinction between groups.

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.

Specific to Eddy, Ingham relates feminist themes to her groundbreaking textbook, Science and Health, as well as many of her earlier writings and sensibilities. Specifically, Ingham lays out Stanton’s and Eddy’s exegesis of the first and last books of the Bible, thereby providing an interpretive space from which to challenge a singular definition concerning creation in Genesis and prophecy in Revelation.

In the late 19th-century era, when the Pauline corpus was often quoted to legitimize women’s subordination, Mary Baker Eddy presented in her writings a rereading of the Pauline tradition as liberating for women. Huff shows how Eddy made the case and modeled in her life that women as well as men have legitimate dominion and must not be dominated.

Simon unpacks Mary Baker Eddy’s theological construct of the feminine divine and shows how Eddy mobilizes her conception of a benevolent maternal deity to challenge the gender ideology and conventions of her day. She finds in Eddy’s Genesis interpretation her ultimate goal: her feminized divine is an enabling belief that undoes Adam’s dream—the history of error, an assumed material selfhood.

The question of child-care in the context of serious health conditions always highlights the tension between medical and prayer-based treatments, and this tension usually turns on the First Amendment protection of religious rights. This article, written from the point of view that medicine is always superior to prayer, refers to prayer treatment as religion-based medical neglect.

Dose’s article is an argument opposing religious exemption from medical care for very sick children. Focusing on the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment, she argues why the government should not endorse spiritual treatment. First, the exemptions are not mandated by the Free Exercise Clause, and second, the exemptions are not a permissible accommodation of religion under the Establishment Clause.

Armer demonstrates how Mary Baker Eddy’s contribution to the field of Adult Education merits a title, the Mother of Adult Education. Eddy’s contributions were made to a field not even distinguishable at her death. Her educational legacy consists of her mandate of total disregard of sex distinctions in students and teachers, lifelong learning, vocational application, service learning, and independent self-directed study.

Choi’s and Huff’s chapters explore how two 19th-century Christian women, Lucy Rider Meyer and Mary Baker Eddy respectively, interpreted Pauline and deuteron-Pauline texts to validate women’s empowerment in the Church. Hogan then details striking similarities between Meyer’s and Eddy’s approaches to these texts, and that of many recent feminist and womanist scholars.

Cobb’s paper focuses on the study of religious practice and its value for Christian literary scholars of conscious reflection. He selects Christian Science as an example of how significant differences from secular norms are revealed when religious practices shape readers’ perceptions. Christian Science teaches a direct imitation of Christ that stresses Christ’s emphasis on watching over one’s thinking.

This exhaustive, groundbreaking book, of special interest to both Christian Scientists and architectural historians, details the conception and building of the original edifice of The Mother Church. It is a treasure trove of primary source materials including 340 illustrations, 20 plates, 400 document reproductions, letters to and from Mary Baker Eddy, biographies and candid discussions of all relevant personnel involved.

Waldschmidt-Nelson meticulously presents, in German, the history and status of Christian Science in Germany from its beginnings to the present. It is based on a documented examination of historical records, published and unpublished writings ranging from panegyrical to dismissive, interviews and correspondence with representatives of the Christian Science church, the medical profession and the Christian clergy (both Protestant and Roman Catholic), and conversations with private individuals.

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.

Having grown up as a practicing Christian Scientist, Hagerty left the organized religion when she discovered she was more comfortable with medical help. But her experience raised unnerving questions about God, reality, and what she really believed. She concludes that Christian Scientists are more deliberate about pursuing the spiritual law. Its practice places a person in the path of spiritual power.

This biography highlights Mary Baker Eddy as a Christian healer and offers the first comprehensive record of her own healing works. It demonstrates how essential her own practice of Christian healing was to her. Part 1 covers Eddy’s life story with examples of her healing works and editorial comments. Part 2 includes additional healing accounts quoted directly from original sources.

​​Scientology was often confused with Christian Science in public thought, especially around the first decade of the current century. Although that confusion has dissipated to a degree, comparisons between the two often crop up in scholarly work. This book, an academic compilation of chapters about Scientology written by scholars of New Religious Movements, includes a few of those comparisons.

Swensen, Rolf. “‘You are Brave but You are a Woman in the Eyes of Men’: Augusta E. Stetson’s Rise and Fall in the Church of Christ, Scientist.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion  24, no. 1 (2008): 75–89. Augusta Stetson was the controversial founder and leader of the largest Christian Science church in the world—completed in 1903, a magnificent 1.2-million-dollar sanctuary located in New York City. She was one of many women at the turn.

Christian Science is one of the eight religious communities examined because of their illustration of major sociological principles. Mary Baker Eddy is noted for having operated “outside the norms of what sociologists call expected gender role behavior.” The authors ask whether Eddy would rightly be considered charismatic and whether Christian Science would rightly be considered a ‘cult’ or ‘sect.’

Weddle compares Jonathan Edwards’s, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, and Mary Baker Eddy’s views on how each understood the connection of divinity with the human and natural world. In response to Emerson, Eddy asks from her Christian Science perspective: How could divine spirit bring forth from itself a world entirely opposite to itself? Either God is material or the world is spiritual.

Within this all too brief chapter on the life of Mary Baker Eddy, Braude contextualizes Eddy among Spirit-moved women who believed that God’s call was more important than social conventions. These women contributed to American religious history as they balanced family, church, and leadership roles. But the complexity of Eddy’s life is better covered in Braude’s other works.