WNHHS February Zoom Meeting — Nicole Ruane — "Mary Baker Eddy: New Hampshire's Most Important Religious Thinker"

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Mary Baker Eddy: New Hampshire's Most Important Religious Thinker

With professor and lecturer Nicole Ruane

Mary Baker Eddy was New Hampshire's most important and most innovative religious thinker. Mark Twain called Eddy "the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary." The church she founded, The Church of Christ, Scientist, profoundly affected both American ideologies of religion as well as public opinion of the role of women in society. This program discusses the ways in which Eddy's experience as a woman in Victorian-era America influenced her gendered understanding of God as well as the nature of humanity, the body, health, and the place of women in powerful organizations. In Eddy's theology, the divine was not punishing but welcoming and caring; not a domineering father but a loving father-mother – a perspective that uplifted the feminine in both the divine realm and the human…