*Science and Health*: A New Book October 26, 2015 Issue

In this column, readers share experiences in which the healing message of Science and Health took on a new freshness and depth, perhaps even after many years of familiarity with the book’s message.

Substantial ‘summer reading’

Susan Booth Mack Snipes

I’ll never forget the summer I fell in love with Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy.

Now, let me just say in all fairness, I have loved Science and Health for as long as I can remember. I grew up reading it, and it has been part of my daily spiritual study and prayer, right along with the Bible, for my whole life. But something special happened in the summer of 2012.

I was spending several months in Maine, and my Christian Science periodicals were not being forwarded. I was hungering for some spiritual nourishment in addition to my daily study of the Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly, and so at the time of day when I might have read some articles, I picked up a paperback copy of Science and Health instead. The thing is, though, I picked it up with the frame of reference that I usually have when I read articles—not so much a dutiful and disciplined approach, but a “free reading” approach—openhearted, like visiting with a friend and just for the sheer joy of ideas that are “easy to be entreated” (James 3:17). It felt as if I were curled up on a rainy day with a good book.