Transcript

Jim Albins: Well, thank you. Thank you all. Good afternoon and welcome to the first program in the Library’s “Works in Progress” series. My name is Jim Albins and I’m manager of program development here at The Mary Baker Eddy Library. We have a real treat in store for you this afternoon because we’re going to be taking a look at the creative process—how an artistic achievement becomes real—from idea to actual creation. That’s the purpose of the Works in Progress series. This afternoon, we’re going to take a look at a special edition of that effort called Mary Baker Eddy, Speaking for Herself. This is the product of a collaborative process that took place over the course of some time. How it came from the artifact that was in the archives, that Lesley is holding up, Footprints Fadeless, to the actual book itself.

We have a great panel here that is going to take us through the description of that creative process. First, Carol Hohle, who is the managing publisher of The Writings of Mary Baker Eddy. Carol has had responsibility for publishing the writings traditionally associated with Mary Baker Eddy—Science and Health and her other authorized publications—and was in charge of the publication of Mary Baker Eddy, Speaking for Herself. Next, we have Lesley Pitts. She is the manager of the archives here at The Mary Baker Eddy Library. Lesley is in charge of the research facility, the reference area, and of course taking care of the manuscripts and the artifacts in the collection. Jana Riess joins us as a noted historian of women’s history. Jana’s role in this creative process was actually writing the introduction to the new publication. And finally, dear and well-known friend to many of us, Phyllis Tickle, who is the contributing editor in religion for Publishers Weekly. Many of you may have seen her in some of the other Library exhibits throughout the past several months.

Lesley, I’d like to begin with you, if we might. There was a day a few years ago when you first walked into the archives and began to take a look at the collection. What I’d like for you to tell our audience today is what was that experience like, when you first went in and tried to get your arms around the collection. What was it you saw and what were your thoughts?

Lesley Pitts: Well, those of you who are familiar with archives will know this, but those of you who were like me, not a researcher previously and going in new, it’s really a world of gray boxes on shelves. It’s not very interesting to look at. To grasp the heart of a collection just by looking in a room isn’t going to do it for you. So what is? Really, it’s working with people who have worked with the collection over a long period of time who have gained some knowledge of what’s within it; and then really digging in. You’ve really got to begin to read the letters themselves, get on a database, look at search words, and really get into the collection that way. Then you begin to see themes developing and different parts of the collection become very real to you. For instance, obviously Mrs. Eddy’s letters were a significant part of the collection; but there is also her incoming correspondence from all the people who wrote to her; all the historical materials that people have collected over the years that are relevant to Mrs. Eddy and to other people; the reminiscences, 800 of them, that people have written about Mrs. Eddy that we’re just beginning to review now; and then the books—Mrs. Eddy’s copybooks, scrapbooks, and her own library, with notations from many different types of books that she read over a period of years. So, it’s a very rich collection, but it certainly takes time and I feel that even two years later I’m still learning.

Jim Albins: Well, Carol, you had a similar experience when you came in as publisher, looking at the collection for the first time, and beginning to get a sense of what it entailed. What were some of your first thoughts about it?

Carol Hohle: As someone who has been working in publishing Mary Baker Eddy’s writings, it was a very different take. She all of a sudden became much more real to me. I had known her in a very neat and organized fashion through typesetting and books. Everyday when I would walk into work our front halls were lined with all the editions of her writings—from 1875 on to today. What I knew of her was neat, tidy, packaged, and organized; and to see her handwriting, wow, it was pretty neat. To see all the different subjects that she was interested in; it had incredible energy.

As I began to read different parts of the collection, I heard a different voice; an unedited voice; a young voice. For example, the Genesis notes that she wrote from 1866 to1869, the exploration there and her description of God and the terms she was using for God. She was deploying the concept of wisdom as a potential name for God. In her later published writings, she established a different set of terms and descriptions for God, and wisdom wasn’t there. It was so rich to see this young, unedited voice, this person coming forward. It was a delight to get to know her in that way.

Lesley Pitts: And you and I were together once in the archives looking through some boxes and we found a letter from a young friend of hers that described her wedding with George Washington Glover and explains what she looked like, how her husband wasn’t so bad after all [laughter], and then it describes all her wedding gifts. It was very different than what we’d been used to.

Carol Hohle: The predecessor of Retrospection and Introspection is a publication called Historical Sketches. I’ve read about these sketches in biographies about Mary Baker Eddy, but to actually read them myself and to hear her voice is different. She wrote much more in the first person than she did by the time it was edited and transformed into Retrospection and Introspection. Of course I’m a big fan of Mary Baker Eddy; I’m involved in publishing her writings. But to see that aspect of her, she jumped out of the books to me.

Jim Albins: Jana, when you first encountered this project, you really came to it as an experienced historian used to working in other archives. You’d certainly worked with other archivists and other documents. What was it about the collection that grabbed your attention?

Jana Riess: In the beginning it was this particular document, Footprints Fadeless, that grabbed my attention. Phyllis called me about a year ago and I answered the phone with a litany of woes of all of the ways I was much too busy already. [laughter] Phyllis didn’t know it at that time, but the first paper I wrote in graduate school was about Christian Science, so I already had been studying it for a number of years informally. I was fascinated by the opportunity and the idea of being one of the first scholars and the first non-Christian Scientists to look at this autobiographical writing of Mary Baker Eddy that had never been published. That was just too much for me to pass up.

Jim Albins: Was there a particular document other than Footprints Fadeless? You mentioned something about the Genesis manuscript?

Jana Riess: I didn’t know about the Genesis manuscript until I came to do research last fall. I think the manuscript is a fascinating opportunity for scholars to look at how Mary Baker Eddy evolved as a theologian. My area of interest in the study of history is of sectarian movements in the nineteenth century including Christian Science, Shakerism, Mormonism, and the Oneida community. One thing that unites all of those groups is that they all had to go back and reinterpret the Book of Genesis in some way to build on it, to found something new; because to move on into a new theology, they had to go back and come to terms with the early primordial story. Mrs. Eddy talks about the ascending order of creation and that woman was created last because she was the highest idea of God. Of course in the nineteenth century this was even more radical an idea than it is to us today.

Jim Albins: Phyllis, you’ve served in many capacities, certainly as friend, but also as advisor to the Library. You’ve had a peek at some of the documents and had a chance to talk with the archivists and to Lesley. What are some of your thoughts about the collection and its importance?

Phyllis Tickle: I think you can’t overestimate it. I make my living writing, and I don’t even have words to answer that question. I think there are really two answers. From the point of view of Christian Science, from one who is a follower of Mrs. Eddy, I’m sure there is a different type of richness. But for those of us outside of Christian Science, looking at what you have provided, what you have opened up to scholarship, to an understanding of American religion, just by making these things available, it’s amazing. One of the things that lifts out, I think, is that because this is the largest collection from a nineteenth-century woman, it collects everything from the very quotidian, order the eggs today, all the way over to the loftiest thoughts in pure religion. Had it been a man’s collection, and we have several male collections, you don’t get that quotidian. You get put the cows out today, but you don’t get the domestic. With Mrs. Eddy’s work, or what I’ve seen of it, you get the whole spectrum, from the domestic to putting cows out, because she was also single many of her years. So it’s invaluable, it’s an intellectual feast. I don’t know how we could ever overestimate what this country has gained by opening up this collection.

Jim Albins: Thank you, Phyllis. Lesley, one of the things that we’re going to take a pretty close look at today is Footprints Fadeless. It’s an interesting document. It has a history not only in its writing, but in the collection itself. How did it come into the collection? What is its background? Was it known? What was the attitude toward it over the years?

Lesley Pitts: Well, it wasn’t a complete discovery because it was certainly known within the collection. It’s actually been published before in an unauthorized publication without permission. But it certainly was a discovery to me. It was a very different document from what I have read before, and certainly it was one of the longest manuscripts in the collection that we have. So although it’s complete because it was kind of packaged as one piece, it’s still a little rough and ready round the edges. There were some incomplete sentences. There were pieces that were stuck on a card that didn’t quite relate from one paragraph to another, so it’s not a clean shot with this manuscript, but it certainly looked as if it were telling a story. When you see a document like that, that is talking to you, speaking to you, obviously it’s something that lifts out of the collection.

Jim Albins: Jana, you were presented with this fairly roughhewn manuscript and asked to put it into context, to put an introduction together and so forth. Tell us a little about what you were trying to achieve when you wrote this introduction. It’s beautifully done and it really covers the entire span of Mrs. Eddy’s life while focusing in on this particular period around Footprints Fadeless. Talk to us a little about what you were aiming at when you put that together and what you hoped to help the reader gain.

Jana Riess: Well the challenge is that Mrs. Eddy’s life spanned nine decades; she lived 89 years. Beginning in 1821,when Mrs. Eddy was born, and ending in 1910, the world changed so dramatically. In the course of her life, she had experienced the major event of the nineteenth century, the Civil War, and also these movements—women’s rights, abolition, reforms of all kinds. Trying to analyze where Mrs. Eddy fit in the context of all of those different movements was a real challenge. I think what I wanted the reader to come away with was an understanding of who Mary Baker Eddy was and how intrepid it was for a woman to write an autobiography at all, and to write two is even more bold. I think that also with Footprints Fadeless, she was writing it in a particular context in her life that became clearer to me throughout the process. She was really shadowboxing and she was trying to answer her critics. It was important to identify one critic in particular in the book’s introduction.

Jim Albins: Well, tell us a little more about that particular critic, the time period involved, and so forth. This was a fairly focused period of her life when she’s responding to some criticism. Take us through the chronology of that, some of the events surrounding it, the characters involved, and what was that all about?

Jana Riess: Footprints Fadeless was written in the winter of 1901-1902 and that becomes significant when you see this other document, “A Complete Exposi of Eddyism or Christian Science: The Plain Truth in Plain Terms Regarding Mary Baker G. Eddy,” by Frederick W. Peabody, member of the Boston Bar. Frederick Peabody had been the attorney for one of Mrs. Eddy’s students, a woman named Josephine Woodbury, who had tried to sue Mrs. Eddy. The judge had just dismissed the lawsuit, but Frederick Peabody was not one to be so easily daunted. He engineered an entire attack on Mrs. Eddy and on Christian Science that he then took to the court of public opinion. In the document of Footprints Fadeless, Mrs. Eddy is responding to him point for point.

When I wrote the first draft of the introduction I didn’t know about this Peabody document until Judy Huenneke, a senior researcher at the Library, called and suggested I take a look at it. When I read it, it explained so much to me because, as Lesley has indicated, this document is essentially unedited. Mrs. Eddy wrote a draft of it, edited very slightly, but never returned to it and didn’t publish it. She jumps from one topic to another. There aren’t connecting transitions to help the reader. It’s almost as if you’ve jumped into a conversation right in the middle and you’ve missed the entire other side of the conversation. Reading the Peabody document helped me to understand some of the very specific things that Mrs. Eddy mentions in the autobiography that hadn’t really made a lot of sense to me. She has a chapter about the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, which was her college, her educational institution, and she makes this great point about how the College was chartered by the State of Massachusetts. When I read Footprints Fadeless for the first time this really puzzled me. Why is this important? Well, it turned out that it was important because Frederick Peabody had accused her of having this College essentially as a sham. He called it a sham on the public, and it was essentially, he said, a way of bilking the public of their money. So a lot of the things that are in Footprints Fadeless that may not make much sense if you just read the document without the context make more sense when you consider the Peabody document as well.

Lesley Pitts: This is where the tone comes back in because as you read it, it’s pretty angry, isn’t it? It’s not the same voice you normally hear.

Jim Albins: So really the “Rosetta Stone”—I think is how you referred to it—to Footprints Fadeless is the Peabody document because it explains both the organization and the tone. She was responding to specific incidents that Peabody was raising. She’s really trying to prove what is not the case. And that’s a tough thing to do with a positive tone. It tends to be a little defensive.

Jana Riess: It is defensive.

Phyllis Tickle: But how important to go ahead and show that side. That’s the kind of integrity that excites me about the Library, the work here, and what it tells us about her. Here’s the other side; here’s the human being with her back to the wall, who’s fighting back, and doing it well.

Jim Albins: It also speaks to the context of the times because she was writing in an environment that was really stacked to a great extent in Peabody’s favor. The unstated prejudices of society against women speaking up are something I want to really jump into with Lesley and Jana now because it’s clear that this document was not published in 1902-1903. Mrs. Eddy chose not to publish it. Lesley, why don’t you tell us what some of your thoughts are about that reasoning process. What was it about the context of that time that made it very wise not to go forward with publication?

Lesley Pitts: Well, she wrote it in 1901 and I think she probably felt that she needed to run it past a few people—maybe because she knew this first draft was strong. If you go into the collection now and look at different drafts of her letters, you’ll find that the first drafts are stronger toned and then they become gentler and that’s the one that gets sent out. Today we don’t have that luxury always with e-mail, we press the button too quickly. [laughter] So I think this was the first draft and she felt she should run it past her secretaries, they were helping her at his point, and somebody decided that it should go to her lawyers. The lawyers wrote back and though they didn’t say she shouldn’t publish they did say she needed to be very careful that she was not pointing specifically to Mr. Peabody because she may be liable for a suit against her. I think it was at that point that she wrote a letter and said let’s leave this aside. But there are other documents in the collection that show she felt that someday she would come back and publish this document.

Jim Albins: Now, Jana, let’s go forward to the context of today. One hundred and one or so years later, things have changed. The context of society has changed. What is it about today’s society that makes it important, even essential, to publish this document within the context of the turn of the century?

Jana Riess: Well, Peabody is conveniently dead and so is Josephine Woodbury. [laughter] You know, I say that in jest, but I think also on a more serious note, when we think about the context when Peabody was giving his lecture and writing this tract, as you say, all of society was on his side. Women had no precedent for entering the public sphere and doing the kinds of things that Mrs. Eddy did. So now, we have women in the United States Senate, we have women on the U.S. Supreme Court, we have women who are ordained ministers, and having leadership opportunities in organized religion. So I think they would be very interested to know about what Mrs. Eddy faced. On the other hand, I think it’s this anger that is very present in the document and makes it more human, more accessible, and more beautiful than her very carefully edited published writings.

Jim Albins: Well, it certainly reveals that the context of the times has changed. It also reveals something about the wisdom that she had in not playing into a hand that was stacked against her at the time. It would have incited potentially further legal action and it probably wouldn’t have been heard within the context of the 1901-1902 period. Now it’s the very fact of the context of that period that becomes a part of the story, doesn’t it? That’s a part of the fascinating thing that you bring out in your introduction. Well, this context around historical documents is a story that is becoming increasingly popular and well known. There are several examples of historical documents related to women’s history in particular that are getting this sort of increased attention because they are so revealing about the time. Jana you were talking about one other example of this sort of publication that is so revealing.

Jana Riess: This is one of my favorite history books, if you’ve never seen it, it’s called A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. This book was written by a professor named Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who is now at Harvard. To me, this represents a real change in how history is being done because we will always see the histories of presidents, kings, wars, and all of those great male things, but we are also seeing this parallel trend toward history from the bottom up. It’s a grassroots history. It is looking at the quotidian, which is what Phyllis was talking about, all the mundane things, the daily details of people’s lives, particularly lives that have been overlooked—women, people of color, people who have been marginalized. One of the most interesting aspects of the story to me is that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was not the first historian to look at the diary of Martha Ballard. Other historians had dismissed the diary as trivial details. Ulrich found this to be the beauty of the story. She’s able to tease out of very terse journal entries, “worked in the garden,” etc., the entire life of this community in Maine and how life changed from the Revolution up until the beginning of the nineteenth century. I just choose this as one example of how the discipline of history is really undergoing a shift, and I think it’s a shift in the right direction.

Jim Albins: There are some things about—and I’m just going to list a few of them—Mary Baker Eddy’s life to further illustrate this issue that worked against her in the nineteenth century, but now make her far more accessible to the current audience. I’d just like to have your comments on them, from the nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century perspective, and then how these issues are viewed today. For example, being a single mother and a deserted wife. What’s the nineteenth-century take on that, the twenty, twenty-first century take on that?

Jana Riess: The nineteenth century take is it must be your fault if your husband had an affair and left you. I think in the twenty-first century our perspective is very different and there’s no shame in being a single parent, being a single mother. In fact, I think people identify even more with the struggles inherent in Mary Baker Eddy’s story.

Jim Albins: How about strong leadership, good management skills, progressive forward-thinking, taking charge?

Jana Riess: Well, these were things that Peabody certainly disliked tremendously of Mary Baker Eddy.

Lesley Pitts: He wasn’t the only one. [laughter]

Jana Riess: No, he was not. The fact that he was packing Tremont Temple to complain about Mary Baker Eddy is revealing of the age. One of the things that he is constantly harping on is the fact that Mary Baker Eddy actually made good money doing what she was doing. It was tremendously controversial for a woman to make a living, and a good one, in this time period. Mary Baker Eddy was a very prudent investor, she was a savvy businesswoman, and in our era, in the Oprah Winfrey era, we think that for a woman to rise above difficult circumstances and achieve great things, that’s something to be celebrated. But 100 years ago, that was not the case.

Jim Albins: And of course in theology, presuming to write about the nature of God, especially something as, say, controversial as the motherhood of God. Nineteenth century: What’s the take on it?

Jana Riess: Controversial, once again. I think with Mrs. Eddy, it’s the fact that she writes this textbook called Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. She’s proclaiming herself an expert on science, which is the domain of men, and theology, which is also the domain of men. So simultaneously she’s entering into these two areas where women were not permitted to go. In the Genesis manuscript Carol mentioned, Mrs. Eddy is referring to God as wisdom. In 1993, there was a conference of feminists and womanist theologians called the “Re-Imagining Conference” and they dared to call God Sophia, which is the Greek word for wisdom, because there is this Biblical precedent in the wisdom literature of Psalms and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes for referring to God as Wisdom. In Greek the word is feminine. There’s this feminine precedent for God. Mary Baker Eddy was doing this in the 1860s. One hundred and thirty years later, women theologians gather to do the same thing.

Jim Albins: Thanks, Jana. Carol, you also had a hand in how the context of the book was shaped. In this case, not so much the historical story, but the physical context of the book itself—how it was composed. Particularly, you decided to include Retrospection and Introspection, the well-known and widely read autobiographical, spiritual reminiscence that Mrs. Eddy wrote with Footprints Fadeless to form Mary Baker Eddy Speaking for Herself. Tell us a little about that decision. Why did you put the two together and what do you think it added?

Carol Hohle: They made a very important pair. Retrospection and Introspection was written in 1892 and Footprints Fadeless in 1902. The pairing of them, being able to see what she’d say ten years later, was really interesting. In 1892, she was just beginning to get some notoriety; in ’02 maybe more notoriety than she wished she had. What was she choosing to write about in ’92 and then again in ’02? So it was great to see her telling some stories of the same account, side by side. What should she choose not to say or tell in a different story? Also the opportunity to bring some photographs from the collection and illustrate the two volumes. Particularly, it brought Retrospection and Introspection even more into the present. To see the people and the places that she spoke about. To have some footnotes that helped to understand some of the times, some of the places, some of the subject matter that she spoke about, just embodied the historical context and helped the two volumes speak together. So I think it was a natural pairing.

Carol Hohle: The other thing that I want to say because it was just fascinating, for me, is that Retrospection and Introspection was a bit of a mystery. As we began studying the historical context around Footprints Fadeless, we began doing the same thing for Retrospection and Introspection. To learn about this genre of spiritual autobiography was quite helpful. The book was a bit of a mystery to me because it started out as a standard autobiography, but then she kind of goes off and in a bit of a metaphysical tangent. To just understand that there was a thing called spiritual autobiography began to tell a fuller story. It made Retrospection and Introspection more accessible to some of us who are a bit more lay.

Jim Albins: Well, you raised a term that we’ve talked a little about: this genre called spiritual autobiography. We have someone on our panel who has participated in this sort of writing. We thought it might be helpful to ask Phyllis Tickle to give us a little history. What is a spiritual autobiography and what’s the current take on it?

Carol Hohle: Just so everyone knows, Phyllis, has written a spiritual memoir. It’s called The Shaping of a Life: a Spiritual Landscape. So, she’s walked the walk.

Phyllis Tickle: Well, let me tell you the first thing about the walk that’s difficult. When Doubleday came and asked if I would do this, and I signed a contract, my euphoria lasted about twenty-five minutes because I walked into the office and my boss Daisy Maryles looked straight at me and said, “Who’s going to care?” [laughter] For six months I was paralyzed. My answer was nobody. I had never thought of my life as being important enough to wonder whether it was important. It’s a kind of humility that’s innately from not having anything to be other than humble about; I think is what it amounted to. It paralyzes one and it took me six months to decide to pick up my pen. During the course of it, what you do discover is that you don’t have to be anybody. Obviously, Mrs. Eddy was, but you don’t have to be anybody. What you do have to be is honest and all you’re doing is using the stuff of life, the quotidian, the everyday things, as a way into looking at the landscape which is the interior life. If you’re honest about the events that take you in, anyone will follow you. You don’t have to be anybody out here. It’s that journey in. Because what you have to have is the physical grounding to make this spiritual real. It gives it flesh. Otherwise, it becomes sort of euphoric and puffy and lacks any kind of place where you can go.

Spiritual autobiography is a big deal right now. Dakota is the most obvious example right now of a bestseller, as well as Kathleen Norris’ book, which is basically a spiritual autobiography. Constantine’s Sword, if you really look at it, is a kind of reflection, a modern spiritual autobiography because it appears to be a thesis on anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church, but it is also the author’s own evolution, if you will, as a Roman Catholic working through the difficulties of his own life as he dealt with anti-Semitism.

Jim Albins: What was the historical context for spiritual autobiographies?

Phyllis Tickle: St. Augustine writes the first one in the Christian tradition. Clearly, there you have a beautiful example of using the most ordinary things. I think almost every high school kid knows the story of Monica’s pears—his mother’s pears—which, as a little fellow, he stole, and how that became St. Augustine’s first moral crisis, as he became aware of what it meant to take something that wasn’t his. So it’s all through the Christian tradition. While we’re on Christian tradition, may I just digress one minute? Jana and I have been talking about this theory. There was in many of the branches of Christianity that were established in the nineteenth century a movement now to do exactly what’s happening here at the Library: to go back and make earlier sources available to everybody. Christian Science is doing it far more broadly and adequately and welcomingly, but there is such spiritual and religious maturity involved in the ability to go back to the primary sources and let the world see them. That kind of confidence in your faith and that kind of willingness to share it and also the fact that the movement in Christianity and all its branches is to go back to its roots. To go back and find out where it was and that’s I think exactly part of what’s happening here. So this is a spiritual autobiography of Mrs. Eddy, yes. But it is also, because she was the founder and discover, the spiritual autobiography of this body of people. This is your spiritual autobiography and I think it’s enormously important.

Jim Albins: Well, this look at the past and then look at the present interest in spiritual autobiography and other works of this sort brings us to the question of the future, Carol. Thinking about what else may be in store, and particularly as we look at the collection itself and putting together a publishing strategy, both in collaboration with the archives and with the publishers, what is the motivating factor of a publisher? You need to have a treasure trove of artifacts or manuscripts, you need to have an interested public, an audience, and you need to have a reason why. What are some of the reasons why we’re taking these steps toward publishing? What is the motivating factor here?

Carol Hohle: Well, I think our motivating factor is the same that Mrs. Eddy had, which was sharing actively what she was discovering about the meaning of life. We have the opportunity to do as she did in sharing the collection as it becomes available. The interest in rediscovering and knowing about Mary Baker Eddy is on the rise and there is this opportunity to meet the audience at a time when they are expressing incredible receptivity. The subjects that she wrote about and was interested in are also at a rise. So we can take the collection and bring it to the public audiences in the ways that they will be interested in. We’re looking forward to talking to other publishers and authors, if any of you are out there, and scholars. I think we’re just beginning to see the opportunities that are ahead.

Jim Albins: Well, that’s very exciting.

Carol Hohle: It is! I mean, the diaries, the letters, the manuscripts that are now published in all those beautiful bound volumes in the Reference Room of the Library just begin to tell us of ways that we can provide additional context to them. They’re in their raw document form and with some more context we’re going to have wonderful stories—new biographies based on her diaries, other ways of putting some of her letters together and having them on different subjects. I think many people as they come into the collection will love seeing what she has to say on leadership, on home, on a whole variety of issues.

Jim Albins: It looks like it’s going to be an interesting future for publications coming out of the collection perhaps with The Writings of Mary Baker Eddy as well as with other publishers from around the country. Phyllis, I’d like to come back to you. Some time ago you wrote an article for us in the Library magazine that was titled “It’s the Book, Seeker.” You made some predictions there; you talked about books becoming portable pastors, you talked about the increasing interest in this whole area of going directly to a source for answers in one’s spiritual journey. That was a little while ago. As Yogi Berra said, “you know the future isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.” Were you right?

Phyllis Tickle: Yes, actually, I was. Probably one of the few times that I was prophetic and in print at the same time, and it’s really consoling to be able to footnote yourself because it was 1987 when I first said books are becoming portable pastors. Those of you who can go back and think of your bookstores or your libraries in 1960 or ’65, will remember there wasn’t a whole lot of religion there. You got it from your denominational houses, but you didn’t see a great deal of religion. By the late ’80’s it was obvious that religion was going to be the fastest-growing segment of American adult publishing. We have that period of huge growth. One of the largest wholesalers in this country, Ingram Books, enjoyed a 246 percent increase in one fiscal year of products moving to market in the religion field. That’s a kind of exponential growth. Now we’ve steadied off, though it’s still probably one of the two largest, fastest growing areas. It goes neck and neck with children’s book sales.

What has happened that I think appertains here is that when I spoke of portable pastors we were talking about people buying books to take to the bookstores the same kind of questions they used to take to pastors’ studies: self-help, spiritual self-help, consolation, much of it interior, and much of it, let’s be honest, ooey-gooey. That’s not a slam dunk against the industry that feeds me, it’s just that a lot of it is generic. Generic God is a scary concept. What has happened is an increased sophistication so that now I’m more inclined to speak of books in religion as portable instructors because there now is an increasing need for more mature material, but also for material that does indeed instruct the soul by way of articulating the mind as well as the faith. Mrs. Eddy herself, I believe, said that it’s a scary thing to believe unless you also have information. And I think that she’s dead on about that. It’s a subtle thing, I don’t mean that there are no more ooey-gooey books out there, there will be forever, but it’s the subtle thing of the emphasis moving increasingly to wanting more mature things. To the kind of maturity that you evidence when you publish Footprints Fadeless, that kind of ability to go back and those are the books that are selling now, those are the books that are finding a broad audience.

Jim Albins: You were saying something about interest in the nineteenth century.

Phyllis Tickle: There’s huge interest in the nineteenth century. When historians write the history of America, the nineteenth century is going to be seen as the century of religion. It’s really where the whole thing takes a large turn and that turn is going to inform what happens. There is going to be far more than just people who are theosophists or Mormons or Christian Scientists, who are going to want to read these materials because it’s clear that something happened in the religious thinking of this country almost from 1850 on. So it’s hugely significant in every way.

Jim Albins: Well it looks like an interesting future.

Phyllis Tickle: It is an interesting future. It’s an exciting future. Whether you’re a person of faith or not, its an exciting future.

Jim Albins: Well, I think that is about the fastest hour that has gone by, certainly in my experience in moderating panels, and I was thinking about how I might sum this up. I was looking at the purpose of the Library in providing context. A big part of the Library’s mission has been to provide context to the historical documents and to the life of Mary Baker Eddy. We tried to illustrate how the historical context worked against publication of Footprints Fadeless 100 years ago. How now it works very favorably in support of its publication. As I asked myself what are some of the measures in which the current context has changed, I looked at each one of the participants and I thought I have the pleasure of participating here with four very accomplished women. A woman who is a publisher. Something not likely or possible or available to many women 100 years ago. A woman who is a manager of an archives—one of the largest archives in the world on the life of a single woman. A woman who is a very accomplished historian, read widely in the United States and abroad, and a noted expert on this field of nineteenth-century religion. And of course, dear friend Phyllis, who is widely read as an author certainly, but as an authority, a recognized authority on books in general. Books incidentally written by men, as well as women. So it was an interesting experience for me as I looked at my companions on this panel and thought that the panel itself really represented how far we have come by the very occupations these individuals hold. Please join me in a round of applause for our panel.