Articles

Two accounts in the Bible tell of individuals who sought healing from Jesus and found it, simply by touching the hem of his robe.   In one instance, a woman who had suffered from uncontrolled bleeding for 12 years approached him.

In 1908, when Mary Baker Eddy asked the Christian Science Board of Directors to start at once a daily international newspaper and call it The Christian Science Monitor, they were startled. And not too surprisingly! When had a religious organization established a non-denominational publication to cover the news—a publication that sets a high ethical standard and provides its readers with top-flight journalism and a solutions-oriented approach to the problems of the world? What is it about the theology of Christian Science that makes publishing the Monitor both logical and necessary? Further, what might Christian Scientists see more clearly of Christian Science theology and practice, so deeply rooted in Scripture, that would impel them to subscribe to the Monitor, since only a minority of the members of the Christian Science church do so? The Hebrew Scriptures have a long history of spiritual seers from Moses to David to Jeremiah, to name a few.

In the 1970s I was head of the Security/Host Division at The Mother Church.   The crime rate in Boston was very high, and this situation affected even the Church Plaza.

A letter in 1900 from Mary Baker Eddy to William P. McKenzie, a trustee of The Christian Science Publishing Society, first thanks him for the Twentieth Century New Testament he’d sent her, noting both advantages and disadvantages of the new translation, as well as her general preference for the “grandeur of climax” in the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible.

Gabriel Vahanian was a man of faith whose critique, The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era, was considered a forerunner of a movement to save Christianity from obsolescence. A churchgoing Presbyterian throughout his life, he wasn’t endorsing Nietzsche’s “death of God” philosophy.

Thursday mornings find us gathered in Marilyn’s family room for our weekly Bible study. We’ve been reading the New Testament together for over two years and are finally reading the book of Revelation.

The quest of physical science is to try to understand nature, to answer questions such as, “How do things work?” “What gives ruby its color?” Great leaps forward have occurred, but deep mysteries remain. One is the explanation of the heaviness of things.

Like dessert, we tend to save gratitude for last— after we get “results. ” But gratitude isn’t a payoff—the reward we give back to God for bestowing on us the result we’re expecting.

There’s something within human consciousness that causes people to feel entitled to all that is good—no strings attached. In the very small world of royalty, individuals born into wealth and position are simply legally entitled by birthright to receive, rather than to earn, their wealth and position.

While praying for the women in a documentary, a writer realizes that the men need to be prayed for, too.