163 - "With Bleeding Footsteps": Mary Baker Eddy's Path to Religious Leadership

"With Bleeding Footsteps": Mary Baker Eddy's Path to Religious Leadership
By Robert David Thomas
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. 363 pp. $27.50.

Robert David Thomas, who teaches at the University School in Hunting Valley, Ohio, has written a superb biography of the founder of Christian Science. An adept historian schooled in psychoanalytic theory, Thomas deftly employs his dual training to create the most convincing portrait of Mary Baker Eddy yet to appear. He traces the conflicts and losses of her childhood and adult years-a mixture of rage and dependence toward demanding parents, the death of two husbands and a divorce from a third, the inability to fulfill her role as mother, and her resentment against the punishing God of orthodox New England Congregationalism. Her genius was to discover an unambiguously good deity, the vision of whom enabled her to overcome at least partially her inner turmoil and to meet the needs of thousands of contemporaries similarly troubled. Although Thomas recognizes Eddy as a creative religious leader, he is not oblivious to her faults. When challenged, she could succumb to grandiose visions of herself and to paranoid thinking. Because the book is so evenhanded, it will probably satisfy neither devotees of Christian Science nor the cult bashers, but for those who wish to understand the complexities of an important religious leader and her significance for American culture, Thomas' book is indispensable reading.

James H. Moorhead
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ,