Christian Science is one of only two indigenous American religions, the other being Mormonism. Yet it has not always been examined seriously within the context of the history of religious ideas and the development of American religious life. Stephen Gottschalk fills this void with an examination of Christian Science's root concepts-the informing vision and the distinctive mission as formulated by its founder, Mary Baker Eddy. Concentrating on the quarter-century preceding Eddy's death, a period of phenomenal growth for Christian Science, Gottschalk challenges the conventional academic view of the movement as a fringe sect. He finds instead a serious and distinctive, though radical, religious teaching that began to flower just as orthodox Protestantism began to fade. He gives a clear and detailed account of the rancorous controversies between Christian Science and the various mind-cure and occult movements with which it is often associated, and contends that Christian Science appealed to disenchanted Protestants because of its pragmatic quality-a quality that relates it to the mainstream of American culture. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

Born into a traditional culture in 1833, Emanuel Suter cultivated the art of pottery and expanded markets across the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, creating a thriving company and leaving thousands of examples of utilitarian ceramic ware that have survived down to the present. Drawing on Suter's diary-rich with meticulous descriptions of his ceramic wares, along with glazing recipes and the quotidian details of nineteenth-century business-as well as myriad other primary and secondary sources, Suter's great-great-grandson Scott Hamilton Suter tells the story of how a farmer with a seasonal sideline developed into a technologically advanced entrepreneur who operated a modern industrial company. As a farmer, Emanuel Suter innovated by adopting new time-saving equipment; this progressive thinking bled over into his religious life, as he endeavored to change the traditional way of choosing ministers by lot and advocated for the formation of Sunday schools in the Mennonite Church. But Suter largely made his mark as a potter, and A Potter's Progress is enhanced by nearly two dozen color images and a close study of the techniques (including kilns and jigger wheels), products, shop organization, marketing, and labor of Suter's shops, revealing the revolutionary role they played in the world of Rockingham County, Virginia, pottery manufacture. This tightly focused case study of the trials and triumphs of one craftsman as he moved from a cottage industry to a full-scale industrial enterprise-prefiguring the market economy that would characterize the twentieth century-serves as a microcosm for examining the American spirit of progress in late nineteenth-century America.