About

photo: by Galina Arlov

Who am I?

Professionally, I’ve written copy for most of the major upscale publications and media companies: The New York Times, Dow Jones, Forbes, The New Yorker, Golf Digest and, for shorter projects, Vogue and InStyle. I’ve worked in advertising and interactive agencies, as well as freelance, which is mostly what I do these days. I don’t specialize in any one area: I write about finance, travel, technology, lifestyle and peace and nonviolence. It’s a pretty wide spectrum, but writing isn’t mysterious. Like everything, you can do it well by paying attention and loving your audience enough to understand their needs.

Who am I personally? That changes from day to day. The constants are: I am tall, the youngest of five girls (now four—my middle sister passed away recently). I am descended from one US president and one pirate and have lived in New York City a long time, downtown, the result of overstaying my welcome long after I got my degree at NYU graduate school of business.

People are surprised by that. They are also surprised by this: I dream of movie stars and politicians. I used to teach Sunday School. I am an orphan with a motorcycle license and a thing for Latin Lovers. I am not married but acquired a dog a couple of years ago. And earlier this year, I became a librarian in a Christian Science Reading Room in my branch church. Now don’t go spreading that around. Before you know it, I’ll be wearing a hair net and then the word will get out and it will be all over.

About The Modern Christian Spinster’s Guide to Love in the 21st Century

It’s a memoir, basically, a Maria-from-the-Sound-of -Music-meets-the-Motorcycle-Diaries kind of story that I’m serializing, chapter by chapter, for this blog. The longer version, the one I hope to sell and have been writing for three years, exists in manuscript form. It’s largely about my lifelong quest to understand love (both the human and divine), my dad’s philandering, my mother’s death and a personal sacrifice I made to teach Sunday School—and what my students taught me.

Aside from that, Modern Christian Spinster is a place for me to share stories that don’t neatly fit into my memoir, like an encounter I had with Javier Bardem at the NYC premiere of No Country for Old Men and how my sister recently became a widow and the time I danced with John Edwards and also the dream in which George and Laura Bush invited me to take an outdoor shower.

One more thing. People keep asking me questions about my religion. So it is with some reluctance that I discuss it below, the reason being that The Modern Christian Spinster’s Guide to Love in the 21st Century was never intended be a forum for advocating for its tenets or defending my own beliefs. Rather, it was conceived purely as entertainment, a memoir about misadventures and revelations extending from an affluent upbringing in and around a church that most people misunderstand to the culture and values of the times.

That said, below are some links and information for those looking to understand it better. For everyone else, just skip right to the tales of modern prudery in which The Modern Christian Spinster delights. And please don’t refer to them as chick lit—or I’m going to have to kill you.

What is Christian Science?

For starters, Christian Science is not Scientology. Many people confuse them. The more important aspect is that it is completely Bible-based. Its mission, according to its discoverer and founder, Mary Baker Eddy, and shared in her textbook, Science and Health, With Key to the Scriptures, is “to reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing.”

I do believe the best way to understand anything is to study first, ask questions later. To that end, I offer the following links, resources, and short explanations.  If, having explored these, you still have questions, give me a chance to put on my Reading Room Librarian/Sunday School bonnet and ask away.

Links

Learn the tenets of Christian Science from the Christian Science textbook. Great place to start your investigation.

Official Christian Science web site. Learn about Mary Baker Eddy, spiritual healing, and practical Christianity from people living Christian Science worldwide. You’ll also find helpful information on core beliefs, questions and answers on such things as when the church was founded, what services are like, what are we doing for the world (among other things) and FAQs.

Christian Science Youth official web site. Explore a diverse community with the stated vision of making “some spiritual noise in a world that really needs it.” Browse the Bible lesson and join in forums, blogs and a discussion of Sunday School, youth summits, media and other issues from a Christian Science perspective.

spirituality.com. You can get information or buy publications from the Christian Science Publishing Society, including The Bible, Science and Health, With Key to the Scriptures and Mary Baker Eddy’s other writings. You can look up Bible and other passages, do key word searches, hear audio chats, and read Christian Science periodicals, including articles on Church happenings around the world, perspectives on spiritual healing and testimonies of healing sharing what the person prayed about, how they prayed, and what was the outcome. Use the search box and bring up articles on everything from finding a job to overcoming addiction, divorce, depression, violence and just about every type of condition known to man. Having a problem with baldness? There are several healings on this. I kid you not.

The Christian Science Monitor web site. Read the international newspaper, including news coverage and analysis of global and domestic politics, events, social trends, arts and culture.

Church Governance and Services

Christian Science is entirely a lay church. Branch churches are run democratically by members and governed by a Manual written by Mary Baker Eddy. This establishes everything from what students learn in Sunday School to electing trustees to the order of services both at the Mother Church in Boston and at the branch church level. It explains, for example, that our “pastors” are the Bible and the Christian Science text book explaining the Bible text in its spiritual import and that these are read at services by two elected readers (one for each book). At the Mother Church, these must be a man and a woman. Branch churches have autonomy on this issue. At my church, the By-Laws stipulate that the readers must include one man and one woman, but at other churches, the gender of the readers is immaterial. These are only a few of the things that make Christian Science a bit different, but there are others.

Sunday services and Wednesday evening testimony meetings are held at CS churches and societies worldwide. Each church also has a Reading Room, Sunday School and child care. I’ve included links below to an online directory where you can find locations near you. Every Christian Science Journal also has listings in the back of each issue).

The Bible Lesson heard in every CS church every Sunday is the same whether you’re in a church in Pretoria, Akron or Buenos Aires. These are available for study and can be read (and bought) on spirituality.com or at Reading Rooms (more on that in a second). There are 26 topics that are repeated twice a year on topics ranging from “Are Sin, Disease and Death Real?” to “God,” “Christ Jesus,” “Love,” “Sprit,” and “Truth.” This week’s lesson is entitled, “Unreality.”

Though the topics remain constant, the passages chosen for each sermon change. But the readers do not choose the topics or the content. Their specific job is to be a reader, not a leader. This is to keep personality from getting in the way of the Bible passages and their spiritual translation from the textbook.

Wednesday evening testimony meetings give the First Reader a small amount of discretion in that it is the one time during the week in which the First reader gets to select a topic and corresponding passages from the Bible and the textbook. These readings last typically a half-hour. The second half-hour is given over to testimonies and comments from the congregation. If you want to know what Christian Science is about, attend one of these services. You will meet some thoughtful people and hear how they are living their faith.

One of the things you will hear frequently about in testimonies is people speaking about working with practitioners. These are spiritual healers within the Christian Science church that employ Christian Science prayer and principles in healing as Jesus did. Christian Scientists can use medical professionals if they so choose, and while some may do this from time to time, most choose to rely on spiritual healthcare and practitioners alone (for those who need it, there are also Christian Science nurses and nursing facilities). For some, the decision to rely on Christian Science may have come as a result of some condition that medical science could not heal but that was healed through the metaphysical work of the patient working alone or in conjunction with a Christian Science practitioner. For others, the decision to rely on Christian Science comes from a lifelong commitment and the practical, reliable, healing results this brings.

Anyone interested in verifying this should visit spirituality.com or a Christian Science Reading Room. Reading Rooms have more than 100 years of documented healings available to the public. Many of these include medical verification by doctors. So you can find healings of broken bones, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease, among others. The media never mentions these, so the public doesn’t know they exist and thinks that Christian Science is just unproven “faith” healing. It is not. The proof exists and you can find it in Reading Rooms everywhere and online at official Christian Science web sites.

So what else are Reading Rooms for? These public spaces are open when the church space itself (by that I mean the sanctuary) is closed. There, you can buy, study or borrow Bibles, Bible Commentaries (we have the full range of translations), dictionaries and other Bible study materials. You can buy children’s books and copies of The Christian Science Monitor (international newspaper), Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures (our textbook) in a range of foreign languages, Mary Baker Eddy’s other writings and periodicals (the weekly Sentinel and the monthly Christian Science Journal,in which you will also find a directory of churches, reading rooms, practitioners and nursesworldwide). All this information is available to the public both in print and online.

Hope this is enough to get you started. If you don’t see your specific question answered in any of the above, leave your question or comment below.  Thanks.