One World or Many? The Case of Christian Science and the Problem with the Ontological Turn

How should scholars of religion take supernatural phenomena seriously without abandoning critical explanation? This paper revisits that question--long important to the cultural history of the study of religion--through the late nineteenth-century writings of Mary Baker Eddy and other Christian Science practitioners. We argue that supernatural healings became experientially real through practitioners’ disciplined religious labor and their engagements with texts, bodies, and objects, while also remaining shadowed by doubt, failure, and dispute. We further posit that the Christian Science case exposes limits in approaches associated with the “ontological turn,” on the rise in religious studies today, which posits multiple incommensurable worlds and insulates religious claims from analysis. Against this trend, we propose a method grounded in ontological realism (the claim that all actors inhabit a shared world structured by common constraints and resources), which treats Christian Science healing as a creative but contestable composition of our shared world.