Cool Boston Ladies - first in a series

Boston, Mass - Top ten things to know about the Christian Scientists:
(10) Mary Baker Eddy founded the Christian Science movement in 1875 after recovering unexpectedly and inexplicably from a spinal injury. She was a deeply spiritual person, and she believed that human beings have healing powers that can be developed through spiritual practice.


(9) Tom Cruise is not a Christian Scientist. That's Scientology. That's different.


(8) Today the Christian Science Church has as many as 2000 congregations around the country, but the First Church of Christ, Scientist - the Mother Church - is right here in Boston.


(7) There is no minister in the Christian Science Church. In Sunday service, lay people take turns reading from the Bible and from Mary Baker Eddy's book, Science & Health with Key to the Scriptures.


(6) In 1908, at the age of 87, Mary Baker Eddy founded the Christian Science Monitor. After 100 years of daily publication, last year this respected newspaper announced that it would scale back to weekly publication of its print edition.


(5) Besides being the founder of a major religion and a major newspaper, Mary Baker Eddy was also an avid abolitionist and a suffragette. What a lady!


(4) She is buried in Mt Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass.


(3) The First Church of Christ, Scientist is an easily recognizable landmark in Boston. Pretty much everybody knows it. But not everybody knows about the Mapparium that is inside the Mary Baker Eddy Library nearby. This is a giant three-story glass globe, with a bridge that allows visitors to take a journey to the center of the earth. The Mapparium was created in 1935 by Chester Lindsay Churchill, who wanted to explore how ideas shape the world. It does have removable panels, which would allow the globe to be updated, but church officials soon realized the futility of trying to keep up with history. And so the Mapparium remains as a model of the world as it was in 1935.


(2) Botswana used to be called Bechuanaland, while Namibia was known as the German South-West Republic.


(1) One skill required of travel writers is the ability to find - when wandering around the city for hours on end - a clean functional toilet. Big, fancy hotels are always a good bet for a place to pee, as are Christian Science reading rooms. And if you're ever in Boston, the Mary Baker Library has a very nice bathroom indeed.


Photos courtesy of the Mary Baker Eddy Library.