God's Perfect Child

God's Perfect Child
First edition
AuthorCaroline Fraser
LanguageEnglish
SubjectChristian Science and The First Church of Christ, Scientist
GenreNon-fiction
PublisherMetropolitan Books
Publication date
1999
Publication placeUnited States
Pages656 (2019 Picador edition)
ISBN978-1250219046
OCLC1050277946
Websitewww.godsperfectchild.com/

God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church (1999) is a book by the American writer Caroline Fraser about Christian Science and her upbringing within it. First published in New York by Metropolitan Books, an anniversary edition with a new afterword by Fraser was released in 2019 by Picador.

Fraser recalls being taught by her Christian Science father, who had a PhD from Columbia University,[1] that matter was not real: "[M]atter was Error and error did not exist."[2] In the 2019 afterword, Fraser describes her father's painful death from gangrene in his foot and his refusal to seek medical treatment for it, preferring to rely instead on Christian Science prayer.[1]

The first half of the book is a critical biography of Mary Baker Eddy which analyzes many controversies surrounding her life and the founding of Christian Science. The second half of the book covers two major incidents in the twentieth-century church. The first involves child mortality under the care of Christian Science practitioners, and the church's attempts to whitewash the deaths and their successful lobbying for exemption from legal liability in all fifty U.S. states. The second involves serious financial mismanagement in the church itself, in which the name of the award-winning The Christian Science Monitor was exploited by outside interests for a failed television program which nearly bankrupted not only the Monitor but also the Mother Church and caused significant issues at both organizations. Fraser observes how the rigid church structure set up by Eddy became a barrier to transparency or accountability processes which might have arisen under a more typical Christian church structure.

Reviewing the book, Martin Gardner wrote in 1999: "No one has written more entertainingly and accurately than Fraser about the history of Christian Science after Mrs. Eddy died in 1910. No one has more colorfully covered the church's endless bitter schisms and bad judgments that have dogged it and in recent years almost plunged it into bankruptcy."[2] According to Philip Zaleski, in a New York Times review: "Few darker portraits of [Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science] have emerged since the days when Mark Twain called her a brass god with clay legs."[3]

References

  1. ^ a b Fraser, Caroline (6 August 2019). "Dying the Christian Science way: the horror of my father's last days". The Guardian.
  2. ^ a b Gardner, Martin (22 August 1999). "Mind Over Matter". Los Angeles Times.
  3. ^ Zaleski, Philip (22 August 1999). "Thinking Made It So, for a While". The New York Times.

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