Social and Cultural Studies Resources

This article investigates the relationship between religious architecture and real estate development in the United States. Using Christian Science churches from the 1920s and the 2020s as case studies, it argues that when churches engage in real estate development, they often use an aesthetic and business strategy termed “material disestablishment” to downplay their religious qualities and engage more effectively with potential business partners and tenants.

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.

Anti-apartheid activist and future president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, visited The Christian Science Monitor as part of his 1990 world fundraising tour. On his visit, he told reporters of the Monitor’s impact on him while he was in prison. “It [the Monitor] continues to give me hope and confidence for the world’s future.”

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 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. 

…the massacre, the Mary Baker Eddy Library both published this article and produced a podcast, “Tulsa Rising,” which includes interviews with Tulsa’s mayor, its Black citizens, and Robert Turner, pastor…

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.

Swensen documents how, in the fifteen years after the passing of Mary Baker Eddy (1910-1925), the Christian Science Board of Directors consolidated and centralized their authority both at Church headquarters and over local branch churches. Mirroring a corporate business model, church organization, administration, and standardization were merged with obedience and loyalty. 

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.

Eder finds in Mary Baker Eddy’s writings about masculinity that Christian Science could not be practiced only as an ethereal form of religion (caricatured as a woman) but reflect “a discernible and repeated thrust to extend the reach of Christian Science thought and practice beyond the sheltered sphere of nineteenth-century feminine religiosity into the proving grounds of the public realm.”

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.

This report examines the history of Black Americans’ interactions with the Chrisian Science church beginning with the 1919 formation of the Committee on General Welfare, and then focusing on the racial unrest of the 1960s. This coverage included the demands made by Black community activists during the church’s 1969 Annual Meeting and the Board of Directors’ written response.

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.

When Furbush attended Principia College in 2014, the admissions application still read: “I will refrain from … homosexual activity…” But on November 18, 2014, Principia changed its century-long discrimination policy against queer people. From 2016-2018, Furbush returned to openly teach (science) at Principia School as the Christian Science institution’s first out faculty member. He says it was an overwhelmingly positive experience.    

Booth seeks correlations between the field of Organizational Development, quantum physics, and Christian Science, with the intent of determining how the principles and practices of Christian Science, in sync with quantum physics, might align with, and be a resource for, business challenges. The thesis is based on interviews with fifteen Christian Scientists about their experience relating their theology to their business practices.

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.”

Matsukata’s article, “History of the Church Universal as Unfolded in Tokyo, Japan” is the 20th-century history of Christian Science in Japan, which began with visits by Christian Science lecturers sent from Boston. Traditions were challenging and hostile to the growth of Western and Christian sects at the time. Translations of articles were deemed ineffective because Japanese culture was so alien.

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.

Reesman details many parallels between Mark Twain’s troubled later life and his one-dimensional literary portrayals of both Joan of Arc and Mary Baker Eddy. Both were visionaries. Joan’s voice in her trial record is consistent, but Eddy was delusional. Eddy uses her mentor, Quimby’s, words for her own profit. Both of Twain’s literary portrayals put his own personality on full display.

Siewers, of the Russian Orthodox faith and briefly, a National Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, observes there are no longer any prominent, mostly Republican, Christian Scientists in the U.S. Congress or White House, or visible in the arts and entertainment industry. He argues that the disappearance and decline of Christian Science is a precautionary tale for more traditional Christian communities.

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.