This year’s National Women’s History Month in the United States honors “women educators, mentors, and leaders.” Activities will highlight their “achievements and contributions” (nationalwomenshistoryalliance.org/womens-history-theme-9-2024/).
Such achievements include profound, if often unsung, contributions to progress in spiritual and religious practice. Mary Baker Eddy made such a contribution when she devoted her time and energy over decades to discerning the Science she was convinced lay behind the many healings recorded in the Bible—especially those performed by Jesus and the earliest Christians. As a result, she discovered Christian Science and authored and published the textbook of her discovery, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 150 years ago, in 1875.
Mrs. Eddy also organized the church she founded “to commemorate the word and works of our Master [Jesus], which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing” (Mary Baker Eddy, Manual of The Mother Church, p. 17). Through both the scientific, spiritual understanding of the Scriptures revealed in Science and Health and the church that has secured the ongoing availability and dissemination of that understanding, generations of women and men have learned, and continue to learn, how to be healers.
