Richard Nenneman portrays the pilgrimage of Mary Baker Eddy from her frail adolescence through the invalidism of her middle years to her years of great achievement as the author of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, one of the best-selling books of all time, and her founding of The Church of Christ, Scientist. Given free access to original sources in the Archives of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Nenneman read all of Mrs. Eddy's correspondence, as well as the letters and reminiscences of many of those who knew her or worked with her.
With this background, he was able to write the story of her persistence, over a forty-five-year period, in sharing this system of Christian healing and establishing an organizational framework to perpetuate it. He writes not only of her achievements, but also of her moments of loneliness, occasional sadness, and even vexation as she, somewhat like Moses in the Bible, led her followers on a new path, a path that she herself was learning more about each year. It was a pilgrimage made successful only because of her deep spirituality and trust in God. Nenneman implies it is also a journal that all may make today because of her legacy to mankind.
About the author:
Richard Nenneman was Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Science Monitor from 1988 to 1992; before that, he had been its Managing Editor and, earlier in his career, Financial Editor for nine years. A student of Christian Science since his days as an undergraduate at Harvard, Nenneman has written about religious subjects before. His honors thesis at Harvard was on the thought of Octavius Brooks Frothingham, a prominent Unitarian minister. And his 1992 book, The New Birth of Christianity, explored the nineteenth-century cultural milieu in which Mrs. Eddy discovered Christian Science.