Health and Medicine in the Christian Science Tradition

Principle, Practice, and Challenge
ROBERT PEEL

This book, like others in the series, is an exploration of a particular religious tradition, viewed in relation to mental, bodily, and spiritual health. It examines Christian Science as both a theology and a therapy--a way of living as well as a system of belief. Breaking through the popular stereotype of Christian Science teaching as a form of positive thinking belonging to the tradition of late nineteenth-century mind cure, the book takes account of crucial aspects of the Christian Science movement often disregarded by social historians. These aspects range from its New Testament roots to its anticipation of today's burgeoning spiritual healing movement in the mainline churches. The emphasis is on what Christian Science doctrine through the past century has meant in terms of human lives rather than on theological niceties. For many readers, including some Christian Scientists, there will be a number of surprises in this fresh presentation of the denomination's view of such diverse elements of the human scene as suffering, mortality, sexual morality, feminism, nursing care, church polity, biblical authority, and the challenges facing an institution dedicated to spiritual radicalism in an aggressively secular, technocratic age. To all it should furnish provocative new perspectives on the current religious scene.

ROBERT PEEL, a historian and journalist, is editorial consultant to the Christian Science Center in Boston. He is the author of seven previous books, including the acclaimed three-volume life of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. His most recent book is Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age.



Health and Medicine in the Christian Science Tradition
Principle, Practice, and Challenge

"The Christian Scientist who reads this book will experience the familiar, the familiar better explained and detailed here than elsewhere. Robert Peel is certainly a veteran well qualified to present Christian Science to those who practice the faith. "The non-Christian Scientist who reads this book will experience the unfamiliar, the unfamiliar better brought home and examined here than elsewhere.... Robert Peel is, to our knowledge, the most capable introducer of this faith, the one who best anticipates the questions one would have."

-Martin E. Marty

Contents

Foreword by Martin E. Marty			vii
Introduction			1
1.	Christian Science: Theology or Therapy?		5
2.	The Word Made Flesh		13
3.	Being and Well-Being		23
4.	Sexuality and Spirituality		33
5.	Science and Health		45
6.	Mortality, Suffering, Madness, Malice		55
7.	Passage to the Light		71
8.	Church and Care		89
9.	Spiritual Healing		99
10.	Decision at the Crossroads		117
Notes			135
Index			147

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