Articles

When a person looks at the world and considers all of its deep and urgent needs, he may feel he doesn't really have the resources or the capacity to make much of a difference. It's often challenging enough to meet what comes to us in the course of our own daily lives.

I'm a concerned grandmother—concerned about the way the media cover criminal prosecutions in my state, California. Several parents, who are Christian Scientists, have been charged with murder and manslaughter for turning to spiritual healing instead of seeking medical aid for a child who died.

The understanding that it is a specific theology which makes possible the practice of Christian Science healing seems to dawn slowly for many of us. We're willing to turn to God, Spirit, for healing in time of physical need, but we're often more impressed with what we are doing than with the nature of the God to whom we are turning.

The following are excerpts from a hearing before the Judicial Committee of the General Court of Massachusetts on March 25, 1991. The subject was the legality of Christian healing.

Children's health care has become a major issue on the national agenda in recent years. For those who care about the First Amendment as well as families, one particular aspect of this issue has presented something of a moral dilemma: the care of children whose parents rely on healing prayer in time of sickness.

The immediate question for the medical community in 1910 was how to respond to the nearly one hundred thousand followers of Christian Science. Public policy was unclear.

"To understand one another .

It is timely to remind Christian Scientists of Mary Baker Eddy's long-standing counsel regarding the practical wisdom that accompanies the practice of Christian Science. The right to worship and to practice one's religion freely is, of course, something precious to many people throughout the world.

Many years ago my mother was brought home from the hospital; the doctors advised my father that they could do no more for her. They had little hope she would live more than a few days.

Surely not as a fragile, temporary vessel in which we seem briefly imprisoned. The nobility and freedom of true being are seen in Paul's words to the Corinthians: "For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.