Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism

Gottschalk, an independent historian and author of The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life, completed this significant intellectual biography of Mary Baker Eddy before his death earlier this year. As with that earlier work, Gottschalk distinguishes himself by placing Christian Science in the larger context of American religion, rather than examining it as a mere curiosity or one-off sect. Eddy, he argues, should be taken seriously as a religious innovator whose radical theological teachings were intended not only to start a new religious movement, but also to reform all of Christianity from within. The biography focuses on the last two decades of Eddy's life, when the ""retired"" leader spent her seventies and eighties overseeing the construction of the Mother Church in Boston, revising Science and Health, battling external critics and internal dissension, and founding the Christian Science Monitor. Gottschalk, who was a Christian Scientist himself and once worked for the denomination, shows a clear pro-Eddy bias at times, especially when he is turning the tables on bombastic critics like Mark Twain or Joseph Pulitzer, but in general the book demonstrates copious and painstaking research. In fact, this is the first major biography of Eddy to be published since the opening of the denomination's archives to researchers a few years ago, and its command of primary sources sheds new light on Eddy's life and work.