Book Annotations

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.

Henniker-Heaton’s meaningful life and Christian Science healing of ten years of paralysis are accompanied by selections from his poetry and other writings. The book’s purpose is to “present the spiritual ideas of this prolific writer in chronological order, setting them in the context of his life.”

Wadleigh’s purpose is to help foster a rebirth and reform in the practice of Christian Science—a rebirth that self-knowledge could help advance. Looking through the lens of his own experience as a longtime Christian Science practitioner and insider, he takes up an appraisal of the Church and its members’ persistently unexamined, unresolved challenges and mistakes. He especially seeks more compassion.

Frederick documents Eddy’s diverse childhood education and touches on broader issues in the education of girls in early America. Eddy’s home was full of newspapers and many educated visitors and ministers. She was tutored by a brother who graduated from Dartmouth, and at age twenty, Eddy was enrolled in Sanbornton Academy where she studied natural philosophy, chemistry, rhetoric and logic.

McNeil’s extensive research of all the original papers of Phineas P. Quimby in conjunction with the vast holdings of The Mary Baker Eddy Library has brought resolution to the complex questions about the alleged influence mental healer Quimby had on Eddy’s later founding of Christian Science. McNeil also covers other important 19th-century figures as well as other relevant subjects, such as Mark Twain and Christian Science and early animal magnetism in 1830s and 1840s America.

When Third Church of Christ, Scientist, Seattle received a congratulatory letter from the Washington Secretary of State for its centennial in 2016, Safronoff began searching old church records and found a thought process along with the recorded unfolding of events. Members wanted their history to show the development of the church and its relationship to the world.

Eddy spent her last three years living in a grand residence outside of Boston. This well-referenced book details her life and the lives of her loyal household— a family of workers who came to support Eddy and the Cause of Christian Science. Frederick references staff diaries and written reminiscences to highlight qualities brought to their tasks, blessings received, and lessons learned.

Petersen has made a paraphrase revision of Mary Baker Eddy’s 19th-century textbook, Science and Health, with the purpose of elucidating divine Science for the 21st century. In her Preface she avows her great efforts to keep Eddy’s original meaning of divine Science intact, while using more current (and inclusive) language and illustrations, and quoting from modern Bible versions.

Horton’s page-turner autobiography recounts her courageous experience rising to the highest place of distinction in the Army Chaplain Corps with, as she often heard, two strikes against her: her Christian Science faith tradition and her being among the first few women to enter the chaplain corps.

Stahl’s study of the intertwined relationship between religion and the military opens a unique but revealing window on the role of religion in society. The distinctive role of Christian Science is sprinkled throughout the book. Hempstead Lyons, a Christian Science practitioner, sought to offer services, but the military’s failure to distinguish Christian Science from other groups resulted in excluding him.

This book examines the relationship between American literary history and Christian Science by looking at Christian Science as an influence on the restitution narratives in the writings of Mark Twain and others. Civil War, Reconstruction, and industrialization had left American society searching for how to restore and heal the nation, and Christian Science influenced restitution narratives and stories of recovery.

Moses’s 1916 book intended to foster a Jewish spiritual renaissance and to prove that Judaism long held what appears so attractive to the early 20th-century Jewish converts to Christian Science: divine healing, affirmative prayer, and a religion of love and law. He catalogs Jewish scripture illustrating healing and divine love, and contrasts Christian Science tenets with Jewish faith.

This beautifully crafted book is essentially a compilation of the writings of Stephen R. Howard, who served as director-curator of Longyear Museum from 1997 to 2014. (The museum is an independent historical institution dedicated to the understanding of Mary Baker Eddy’s life and work.) Nearly every page includes multiple photographs, facsimiles, artwork, Illustrations and portraits representing the holdings of the museum.

Feminist scholarship will benefit from this research on Eddy’s relation to the suffragist movement and why the chapter ‘Marriage’ is placed in an early, prominent position in Science and Health. Eddy had stated that Science and Health had ‘crossed swords with the free love’ as embraced by Spiritualists and Revivalists, even as they were drawn to Christian Science because of its radical departure from the patriarchal church.

Kramer’s well-researched critique on Christian Science makes her arguments easier to understand than most critics. She grasps the fundamental teachings and history of the religion well, but she left it for doctrinal reasons. Most of Perfect Peril describes her emotional and intellectual struggles with doctrinal issues. Following a crisis of faith, she concluded that Christian Science is a dangerous mind control. 

This is the well-researched and definitive history of a major lawsuit (one of the biggest national news items in 1907) against Mary Baker Eddy. Ostensibly, this ‘Next Friends’ suit was to protect the interests of Mary Baker Eddy and her inheritance by way of arguing that Eddy was the helpless dupe of her male employees. Eddy eventually won the suit.

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.

Legal historian Rogers analyzes the legal and constitutional struggle over whether a religious belief may trump a generally applicable and neutral law prohibiting child abuse and neglect. He concludes that when legislators succumb to Christian Science lobbyists advocating a special religious interest or privileging harmful religious conduct, they are guilty of undermining the religious freedom they claim to be protecting.

Although these contemporary authors never met, their mutual interest in sincere religion and the power of thought inevitably brought the two distinguished figures into a provocative relationship. The fact that he shifted his position on Christian Science several times indicates the conflict within his own worldview. It was no more insane than any other channel of human thought. Just more interesting.

Although written for young readers, “A World More Bright” contains details for those interested in the personal side of Mary Baker Eddy’s life story. For those more familiar with other biographies on Eddy, this book offers new facts that may be useful for filling in gaps of historical interest. Typical biographical controversies are mentioned but not critiqued by the authors.

Sandford gives a definitive account of the history of Christian Science in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) based on his experience as a U.S diplomat and extensive research in official GDR archives. He covers the country’s initial hostility toward Christian Science as a foreign institution, to a post-war relaxation of restrictions, to recognition and re-establishment of rights just before the Berlin Wall fell.

Dorothy von Moltke’s letters to her parents contain significant insight into Christian Science in Germany from 1902 until her death in 1935, with a focus on troubles within Germany after WWI. Dorothy and her husband, Count Helmuth, served on the 1912 committee translating Science and Health into German, and Helmuth was the church’s designated liaison with the German government during early phases of Nazi control.

Unlike the first volume in this Expanded Version of the We Knew Mary Baker Eddy series, this second volume includes all new material unavailable in the original series of four volumes by the same title. These self-selected writers were workers who held great admiration for Eddy, but several also acknowledged Eddy’s severe expectations for those who served her.

Collins, a Christian Scientist who acknowledges his hope for the future success of The Christian Science Monitor, presents an account of the Monitor’s history including its weaknesses and unique strengths. Collins brings his readers through the twists and turns of the paper’s relationship with the world’s needs and the spiritual demands of the Monitor’s mission, including its successes and two near collapses.

In 2009, The Christian Science Monitor had just become the first newspaper to support a multiplatform format: csmonitor.com, a 24/7 website. Fuller’s research and writing on the Monitor contributes substantive support for scholars of 21st-century journalism and the study of the formation of Christian Science in the closing years of Mary Baker Eddy’s life when she established the Monitor.