‘How Mrs. Eddy is being discovered’

from The Christian Science Journal

Dr. Larry Dossey, physician
Mrs. Eddy is a heroine of mine. I regard her as a great physician, a courageous explorer of the power of consciousness in healing. It required immense courage to take the stand that she did. I think she would really love to see some of the developments in scientific medicine now showing the distant effects of prayer. She would not be surprised; she would be validated. And I think she would be very happy to see these developments.

Dr. John E. Fellers, Institute of Religion, The University of Texas
She kept reminding us in a very real way that there is an interconnectedness with what goes on in the soul, spirit, and what goes on in the body. This is the great “medical school” contribution of Mary Baker Eddy.

Reverend Tina Saxon, minister
To find a woman so strong that she can heal body, spirit, and start a whole Church, now that’s something that stayed with me for life.

Larry Lipman, president, National Press Club
What do you do if you’re eighty-eight years old, you’ve already created a denomination, and the newspapers of the day start attacking you? Well, if you’re Mary Baker Eddy, you create your own newspaper, and you show them how it’s supposed to be done.

Reverend Anne Ard, minister
[I admire] Mary Baker Eddy’s commitment to saying, not just to women, but to everybody—but particularly to women—that they were a gift from God. That who they were was not defined by the circumstances in which they found themselves. And that is an incredibly powerful message.

Lauren Guy, sixth-grade student, New Jersey
I think [Mrs. Eddy] should be a role model [showing how] to just keep going at it and going at it. I mean, her own sister offered to give her a home if she would stop what she was doing, and she said “No,” and she kept going and going.

Robert Abernethy, television host, “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly”
Look what happened as a result of [Mrs. Eddy’s] life, and what began with her teaching—a very significant American-grown movement and church; a world-class newspaper; and, in many ways, the foundation for the current enormous interest in the relationship between spirituality and health.

Anne Braude, director of women’s studies in religion at Harvard Divinity School
There’s no question in my mind that Mary Baker Eddy exercised a degree of religious authority that was absolutely unprecedented for an American woman. I don’t think there’s any other American woman whose thought has that authoritative role in any religious tradition.