Biographies and Chronologies

The Mary Baker Eddy Library examines Eddy’s correspondence and documents related to the 1881 chartering, development and fruition of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. The College, an institution meant to teach Eddy’s metaphysical healing method, accepted both sexes regardless of age or gender. Eddy intended her students to practice what they learned back in their own communities.

A 20th-century pioneer in the fashion industry, Adele Simpson attributed her significant achievements as an artist and a businesswoman to her practice of Christian Science. It benefitted her by 1) bringing the balance to her life that had been lacking and 2) the idea that all her creative work was governed by God, the one creative Mind, not herself.

This research on Native American affiliation with Christian Science highlights Tsianina Blackstone, a Native American singer, who later became a Christian Science practitioner for four decades. It also includes links to the church periodicals where one can find Native American healing testimonies, how Native Americans were blessed by Christian Science literature, and Christian Science evangelizing work on reservations.

Mary Baker Eddy’s support for the emancipation of slaves in the confederate states is shown through her correspondence with Union Army generals Benjamin Butler and John Fremont in their efforts and support of the emancipation of slaves. Along with regular correspondence, Eddy took initiative and drafted a petition in support of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Mary Baker Eddy’s approach to the weather is the topic of research, including stories of how threatening weather and the laws of nature were made subordinate to God’s divine law. One student of Eddy’s explains how she instructed them not to try to control the weather. Rather, their prayers were to affirm that God, not outside influences, governs the weather.

Christian Scientists from Chicago would convince a skeptical Mary Baker Eddy to participate in the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions with its message of unity among all religions. Although the address was enthusiastically received, its overall negative impact was the association of Christian Science with theosophy and Vedanta, and the crystalizing of opposition from the more traditional Christian Churches.

Mary Baker Patterson [Eddy] responded to newspaper accounts of the courage and wisdom of the Union Army General, Benjamin F. Butler. As commander of the fort where three enslaved men sought refuge, Butler’s defense became a foundation for legal freedom for slaves. Eddy’s letter to Butler sheds light on her anti-slavery convictions and willingness to advocate for them. 

Introvigne determines that Kwon’s book on American painter and Christian Scientist Joseph Cornell is both “a superb achievement and a missed opportunity” (188). Since Kwon acknowledged that Christian Science was “an epistemological structure that shaped [Cornell’s] worldview rather than a set of principles he sought to illustrate” (quoting Kwon, 221), religion scholars would have hoped for more details. 

Countess Dorothy von Moltke was a devoted Christian Scientist and strong advocate for the German translation of Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook Science and Health. Throughout her life, she worked to make Christian Science more accessible to German-speaking followers by providing English lessons and by serving on the translation committee that ultimately completed the first foreign language translation of Science and Health.

The derivation of psychotherapy is examined through the contributions of 19th-century American mind-cure movements and personalities such as Swedenborgianism, spiritualism, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Warren Felt Evans, New Thought, Christian Science, and the Emmanuel Movement. These movements’ focus on the connection between the healer and sufferer made them precursors of contemporary psychotherapy’s relation-based methods.

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.”

After the healing of her son through reading Science and Health, Marietta Thomas Webb became a devoted student of Christian Science and eventually, one of the first Black Journal-listed Christian Science practitioners. This article shares her journey of finding Christian Science, and the racial discriminiation she faced as a Black Christian Science practitioner.

The objective of Armer’s study of Mary Baker Eddy’s establishment of her Massachusetts Metaphysical College is to highlight the achievements of women pioneers in higher education and entrepreneurial successes. Characteristics of Eddy’s business success included taking risk, managerial skills, knowledge of the product and the market, financial resources to produce capital, and enough success to produce profits.

Prominent business woman of franchised beauty shops, Martha Matilda Harper, publicly accredited Christian Science with healing her and sustaining her through decades in business. Harper set up a system of training for the many women of modest means who became operators of the 500 franchises, which by the 1930s were spread throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.

Hussey examines how Christian Science guided and sustained Nancy Astor as the first woman to sit in the British House of Commons in 1919. Her political career of 26 years focused on temperance and support of women and children. Astor found healing by reading Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook, and with her husband, founded Ninth Church of Christ, Scientist, London.

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.

…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…

O’Brien’s interfaith reflections illustrate how sympathy can help bring heaven to earth—as evidenced in four women: Mary Baker Eddy, Emily Dickinson, Sarada Devi (wife and mission partner to Ramakrishna) and Simone Weil. O’Brien finds a basis for this sympathy in the common conviction found in many religions of “the experience of oneness between the supreme Spirit and everyday empirical reality.”

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.

The Mary Baker Eddy Library discovered letters to Eddy from student Lucinda Reeves detailing accounts of the healing of Black Americans. Reeves first healed a Black American family and later two other patients. These accounts of healing are significant because they show that Black Americans had encounters with Christian Science earlier than previously thought.

This comprehensive 80-page chronology begins with the birth of Mary Baker Eddy in 1821 and ends with her funeral in 1910. In between, it includes the individuals, events, and publications connected to the multifaceted life of Eddy. The scholar can also tap into the Chronology’s extensive footnoting for source material.

Swensen examines the initial flock and organization of the Church Mary Baker Eddy founded and then disbanded ten years later. The early 1880s brought new members and stability, spurring Eddy to organize. But this embattled precursor of today’s Mother Church would be irredeemably challenged by a volatile membership, unreliable preaching by invited clergy, and confusion over competing metaphysical groups.

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.