In this book of personal essays, people representing a variety of faiths respond to questions about the Covid pandemic and its impact on their spiritual practice. Susan Searle writes from a Christian Scientist viewpoint, and explains that she accepted vaccination in order to continue her public ministry.
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“Practising My Christian Science Faith during the COVID-19 Pandemic” (2023)
Shirley Paulson responds to questions about the Covid pandemic and its impact on the practice of her faith, Christian Science. She discusses how the pandemic experience highlighted the need for greater maturity in spiritual healing practices, such as more concern for public issues and greater spiritual clarity, strength, and authority.
View Annotation“Authorship and Authority in Intellectual Property: The Copyright Activism of Mary Baker Eddy” in Copyrighting God: Ownership of the Sacred in American Religion (2019)
…and its ineradicable link to her personality” (123), a concept that presaged her later appointing Science and Health (along with the Bible) as Pastor of the Christian Science Church. Responses…
View Annotation“A Room of Her Own: The Mary Baker Eddy House, Chestnut Hill” (2019)
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.
View Annotation“Christian Science” in The Essential Guide to Religious Traditions and Spirituality for Health Care Providers (2019)
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.
View Annotation“Considering Issues of Mass Incarceration Through the Lens of the Beatitudes” (2017)
Paulson’s essay is one of 22 in this ecumenical collection. She draws on the beatitudes of Matthew 5 to illustrate biblical guidance to loving others (even our enemies) and dismantling both victimhood thinking and criminal behavior that contribute to mass incarceration. Paulson’s analysis of each beatitude is based on the teachings of Christian Science and uses quotes from Mary Baker Eddy.
View Annotation“The Bible and Christian Scientists” (2017)
…the “Apocalypse,” and a “Glossary” of biblical terms. Eddy appointed the Bible and Science and Health the dual pastor of her Church, which “publicly yoked the Bible to Science and…
View Annotation“Church of Christ, Scientist (Christian Science)” in Handbook of Denominations in the United States (2014)
The section in this book devoted specifically to Christian Science is relatively brief, but the descriptions of the teachings and church structure accurately portray the issues most commonly affirmed by adherents. Topics of criticism also reflect the most common concerns from religious, medical, and social perspectives.
View Annotation“Church of Christ, Scientist: Adherent Essay” (2014)
This essay by an adherent of Christian Science accompanies the main article on Christian Science. Paulson describes her childhood experience and how her religious practice was her primary source of comfort and healing. She recognizes distinctions between Christian Science and orthodox Christianity and explains why she thinks the typical orthodox view of Christian Science’s similarity with Gnosticism is misleading.
View Annotation“Church of Christ, Scientist: History, Beliefs, Practices” (2014)
This essay on Christian Science is one of many descriptive introductions of various religions and their relation to evangelical Christianity. Simmons notes that the ‘Christian’ element in Christian Science involves a radical reinterpretation of Jesus and his role in the New Testament. Mary Baker Eddy stressed the practical nature of her ‘science’ in human challenges, thus highlighting the focus on healing.
View Annotation“It’s All in the Mind: Christian Science and A Course in Miracles” in Reading and Writing Scripture in New Religious Movements (2014)
Gallagher examines Mary Baker Eddy’s and Helen Schucman’s (A Course in Miracles) interpretation of scripture and development of their own canons. Gallagher sees Eddy’s Science and Health as a Bible companion which has the power to heal the reader and requires deep study. Similarly, Gallagher sees Schucman’s ACIM as indispensable to understanding the Bible, providing a mystical interpretation of scripture.
View Annotation“The Mother Church: Mary Baker Eddy and the Practice of Sentimentalism” (2014)
Stokes argues that Mary Baker Eddy’s human story resembles the plot line of American literary sentimentalism of the 19th century, but she cautions that such sentimental narratives were not as emotionally overwrought as critics have charged. Sentimentalism did not merely trace tragedies but offered readers a protocol for managing agony and loss. It constituted Christian piety as incompatible with body glorification.
View Annotation“Christian Science Christians’ Healing Practice: A Contribution to Christian Pilgrimage” (2013)
Written by representatives from a wide variety of Christian communions, the essays in this book seek Christian unity in mission. Unity is how diverse churches can agree to a common purpose. Mission is how the church’s purpose is transformational in both personal and social dimensions. The Christian Science chapter is: “Christian Science Christians’ Healing Practice: A Contribution to Christian Pilgrimage.”
View Annotation“Complementary and Alternative Medicine” (2012)
The two paragraphs devoted to an explanation of Christian Science healing practices present a view solely from the perspective of medicine. The article argues that Christian Science practitioners cannot perform a number of ordinary medical procedures such as a diagnosis of illness. Butler expresses concern that those who are not healed might become depressed or conclude they are unworthy.
View Annotation“The Christian Scientists” in America: Religions and Religion (2012)
Albanese’s undergraduate textbook explains Christian Science in the context of the evolution of religions and the meaning of religion in America. Christian Science was one of the 19th-century new religions that made considerable demands on its members, as new sects often did. Albanese’s theological explanations of Christian Science are based on her thorough knowledge of the American metaphysical movement.
View Annotation“Christian Science” in The Soul of Medicine: Spiritual Perspectives and Clinical Practice (2011)
Driessen’s chapter in a book about spiritual perspectives and clinical practices is devoted to the religious background, practice, and ethics of Christian Science treatment. Driessen, an officially recognized Christian Science practitioner, describes the theological foundation of the Christian Science worldview, the resources for healing, and the relationship of Christian Science ethics with the medical world.
View Annotation“Loy and Cornell: Christian Science and the Destruction of the World” (2010)
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.
View Annotation“Mary Baker Eddy: Liberating Interpreter of the Pauline Corpus” in Strangely Familiar: Protofeminist Interpretations of Patriarchal Biblical Texts (2009)
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.
View Annotation“Response to Choi and Huff: Paul and Women’s Leadership in American Christianity in the Nineteenth Century” (2009)
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.
View Annotation“Christian Scientists” in Extraordinary Groups: An Examination of Unconventional Lifestyles (2008)
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.’
View Annotation“From Edwards to Emerson to Eddy: Extending a Trajectory of Metaphysical Idealism” in The Contribution of Jonathan Edwards to American Society and Culture: Essays on America’s Spiritual Founding Father (2008)
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.
View Annotation“When the Spirit Moves Women” in Sisters and Saints, Women and American Religion (2008)
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.
View Annotation“Sola Scriptura. Genesis Interpretation, Christliche Anthropologie und Feminismus im Viktorianischen Amerika (‘Genesis Interpretation, Christian Anthropology and Feminism in Victorian America’)” (2008)
This article includes an examination of feminism and the quest for gender equality in 19th century America, particularly in rejection of interpretations of the second biblical creation story that justified male dominance and female subservience. One sub-section devoted to Mary Baker Eddy describes her unique interpretation of the spirituality of divine creation, which undergirds Christian Science and the church she founded.
View Annotation“Mary Baker Eddy, 1821–1910” in Splendid Seniors (2007)
Primarily useful for high school researchers, this brief chapter on Mary Baker Eddy summarizes her life and teaching. It fits the context of the book which is a celebration of the accomplishments of famous people during their senior years. Despite the intense criticisms against Eddy, her church grew and prospered. She was honored posthumously in 1995 and in 1998.
View Annotation“Christian Science” in Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in America (2006)
Simmons contextualizes Mary Baker Eddy amidst the late 19th-century era of revolutionary change showing how her forebears (Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism, Transcendentalism and Spiritualism) “prepared the psychic way” by making explicit to “the American spiritual imagination the connection among physical, psychological, and spiritual health” (94). He reviews Eddy’s theology, the influence of Quimby, and the evolution of Christian Science as an institution.
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