God's Perfect Child
Description
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former Christian Scientist Caroline Fraser comes the first unvarnished account of one of America's most controversial and little-understood religious movements.
Millions of Americans - from Lady Astor to Ginger Rogers to Watergate conspirator H. R. Haldeman - have been touched by the Church of Christ, Scientist. Founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879, Christian Science was based on a belief that intense contemplation of the perfection of God can heal all ills - an extreme expression of the American faith in self-reliance. In this unflinching investigation, Caroline Fraser, herself raised in a Scientist household, shows how the Church transformed itself from a small, eccentric sect into a politically powerful and socially respectable religion, and explores the human cost of Christian Science's remarkable rise.
Fraser examines the strange life and psychology of Mary Baker Eddy, who lived in dread of a kind of witchcraft she called Malicious Animal Magnetism. She takes us into the closed world of Eddy's followers, who refuse to acknowledge the existence of illness and death and reject modern medicine, even at the cost of their children's lives. She reveals just how Christian Science managed to gain extraordinary legal and Congressional sanction for its dubious practices and tracks its enormous influence on new-age beliefs and other modern healing cults.
A passionate exposé of zealotry, God's Perfect Child tells one of the most dramatic and little-known stories in American religious history.
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CONTENTS
Preface: God's Perfect Child 1
At the First Church of Christ, Scientist, Mercer Island ¿ Raising the Dead ¿ The Cross and The Crown ¿ I Tip My Hat
Part I. Mary Baker Eddy: "Mere Historic Incidents" 25
"A Very General Acquaintance" ¿ "Mere Historic Incidents" ¿ "An Agreeable Variety of Pain" ¿ Mother Mary ¿ "Gems of Truth" and "Dewdrops of Wisdom" ¿ Dr. P. P. Quimby and His Disciple ¿ The Fall in Lynn ¿ Healing and Head-Rubbing ¿ Science and Health, First Edition ¿ "A Touch of Fanaticism" ¿ "I Shall Never Again Trust a Man" ¿ "Take Up Spofford" ¿ "A Demonic Strain" ¿ Science and Health, Second and Third Editions ¿ "Mesmeric Poison"
Part II. "You Will Have to Learn to Love Me More": Mrs. Eddy Builds Her Empire 93
Footman Frye ¿ The Boston Craze ¿ "Mind-Quacks" ¿ At the Massachusetts Metaphysical College ¿ Metaphysical Obstetrics ¿ Another Son ¿ The Mother Church ¿ M.A.M. at Pleasant View ¿ "A Power Not One's Own" ¿ The C.O.P. and "The Corrective Work" ¿ Mark Twain and "That Shameless Old Swindler, Mother Eddy" ¿ Radical Reliance and Mrs. Eddy's Teeth ¿ The "Excelsior Extension" and the "Next Friends" ¿ Willa Cather's Secret ¿ "Call It the Christian Science Monitor" ¿ The
Stetson Problem ¿ "A Combination of Sinners That Was Fast" ¿ Science and Health, 1910 Edition ¿ Postscript: "Mrs. Eddy's Place"
Part III. "Nothing Has Gone Right Since 1910": Christian Science After Death 195
The Telephone in the Tomb ¿ The Great Litigation ¿ Lady Astor Leads the Way ¿ Nothing Succeeds Like Supply ¿ "Three Cheers for the Christian Scientists" ¿ Healing in Hollywood ¿ "The Blight That Failed" ¿ Paul Revere Rides Again ¿ Behind the Scenes with the Metaphysicians ¿ "The President's Son of a Bitch" ¿ The Kerry Letters
Part IV. "God's Law": Christian Science Goes to Court 299
Breaking the Law ¿ Writing the Law ¿ The Child Cases ¿ Gaslight ¿ Fruitage ¿ Inside the Sanatoriums ¿ The Child Cases Come to Boston
Part V. "God's Requirement": Christian Science on the Air 393
Mrs. Eddy and Mr. Ed ¿ "To Live for All Mankind" ¿ "Betting the Company" ¿ "One Spooky Operation" ¿ "USA Yesterday" ¿ "The Big Room" ¿ The Dissidents and The Destiny of The Mother Church ¿ The Facts ¿ "Schisms in Our Church" ¿ A Cancer ¿ "My Child Is Dead"
Part VI. "God Will Do the Rest": Resurrecting Christian Science 457
"God Will Do the Rest" ¿ Science and Health for the New Age ¿ Accentuating the Positive ¿ Eliminating the Negative ¿ Remarkable Providences
Afterword: The Church That Can't Heal Itself 517
Acknowledgments 529
Glossary 531
Notes 541
Selected and Annotated Bibliography 619
Index 629