Rolling Away the Stone is a richly detailed account of the last two decades of the life of Mary Baker Eddy, a major religious thinker whose character and achievement are just beginning to be understood. This is the first book-length discussion of Eddy to make full use of the resources of the Mary Baker Eddy Collection in Boston. It focuses on her long-range legacy as a Christian thinker, specifically her challenge to the materialism that continues to threaten religious belief and practice in our time.

Hoping to retire in 1889 after seven turbulent years founding the Christian Science movement, Eddy believed the demands upon her would ease. Instead, during the 1890s and 1900s, she entered into the most active and fruitful period of her long life, becoming a nationally and even internationally known figure. The radical character of Eddy's teaching, together with her position as a woman religious leader in a male-dominated society, aroused storm clouds of controversy that have continued to swirl around her memory today. The book opens with an account of the critical point in this controversy when her very sanity was challenged in a litigation that became one of the first media events of the 20th century.

Stephen Gottschalk also traces the fascinating relation between Eddy's encounter with the problem of evil in the first half of her life and how Mark Twain, her best-known adversary, faced the same issue during his later years. Gottschalk then explores how Eddy's challenge to materialism shaped her response to a series of crises that arose as she brought her life's work to completion. This is a sensitive and serious biography of an important figure in American religious history.

"Gottschalk, an independent historian and author of The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life, completed this significant intellectual biography of Mary Baker Eddy before his death earlier this year. As with that earlier work, Gottschalk distinguishes himself by placing Christian Science in the larger context of American religion, rather than examining it as a mere curiosity or one-off sect. Eddy, he argues, should be taken seriously as a religious innovator whose radical theological teachings were intended not only to start a new religious movement, but also to reform all of Christianity from within. The biography focuses on the last two decades of Eddy's life, when the 'retired' leader spent her seventies and eighties overseeing the construction of the Mother Church in Boston, revising Science and Health, battling external critics and internal dissension, and founding the Christian Science Monitor. Gottschalk, who was a Christian Scientist himself and once worked for the denomination, shows a clear pro-Eddy bias at times, especially when he is turning the tables on bombastic critics like Mark Twain or Joseph Pulitzer, but in general the book demonstrates copious and painstaking research. In fact, this is the first major biography of Eddy to be published since the opening of the denomination's archives to researchers a few years ago, and its command of primary sources sheds new light on Eddy's life and work." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

A stimulating new examination of the life and thought of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, by a renowned authority on the religious movement.