| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Prayers in Stone: Christian Science Architecture in the United States, 1894–1930. By Paul Eli Ivey. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xxii, 227 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-252-02445-1.)

Throughout its history, Christian reform has often made use of a rhetoric of purification and of return to the original conditions of "primitive Christianity." Christian Science's program to "reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing," in the words of Mary Baker Eddy, argued that the Church had gone astray from its original charge, from the purity of its first days, and was therefore in need of reform to recover its lost authenticity. Architecture was an important element in this enterprise of purgation and recovery. Buildings shape those within them and state in lasting physical terms to the world outside the reforming presence of the faith. Much of what a group is or wants to be, how it understands itself and desires others to see it, is worked out in the silence of built environments, as "prayers in stone," as Paul Eli Ivey eloquently titles his instructive new history of Christian Science architecture in the United States. . . .

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