As if growing up wasn’t already hard enough, Lucia Greenhouse, author of fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (Crown Press), grew up encased in a family that didn’t believe in illness. Think about that for a second. The family of Lucia Greenhouse, like many Christian Scientist families, did not believe in illness; rather, they believed that man, made in the perfect image of God, is without error, and that sickness is an illusion—the illusory manifestation of incorrect thinking. Having not known anything about Christian Science before reading Greenhouse’s book—aside from the presence of their reading rooms in just about every city I’ve ever been in—this aspect of the religion came as a complete surprise. To my dismay, I found that what was just shocking for me, was tragic for Lucia Greenhouse.
MORE »