![]() Mary Baker Eddy had participated in séances, even acted as a medium herself, but came to see Spiritualism as a misconception that her own new American religion would correct. The Apostle Paul called faith “the evidence of things not seen,” but Spiritualism would provide evidence of afterlife, and mediums “experimented” with “test conditions” for spiritual “investigations.” Ironically, Spiritualism, with its circles of the bereaved gathered about a medium in séance, now the perfect picture of Victorian quackery, had become popular by making the spiritual “scientific.” In a new scientific era, faith alone could not sustain religion. Seance scene, from the 1933 film The Testament of Dr. It still features the neoclassical design elements Beman advocated, however, as reflecting the “rational approach to spirituality” the new American religion sought to formulate. Unlike Karpeles’s museum in Buffalo, the Jacksonville building wasn’t designed by Christian Science architect Solon Spencer Beman, but by Jacksonville’s Marsh and Saxlebye. ![]() He likes the neoclassical style of former Christian Science churches. From Santa Barbara to Duluth and Shreveport to Buffalo, Karpeles has collected 15 such buildings across the country. When book and manuscript collector David Karpeles bought the 1921 building to showcase his revolving collection in 1992, it became his fourth. He loves the work and loves the building-together they’re a second home, his first home being just around the corner on Hubbard Street. Richard Minor has managed the Jacksonville’s branch of the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in the city’s former First Church of Christ, Scientist sanctuary since Thanksgiving 2005, 84 years to the day from the first Christian Science services held here. They hadn’t advertised and hadn’t made accommodations, so they slept in the building where strange lights synesthetized percussive minimalist electronica earlier in the night.Įlizabeth Baker, courtesy Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy Instead she played soaring electronic John Cage music with two other musicians. She’d planned to perform compositions for toy piano. It wasn’t the time she placed dildos on piano strings to record deep earth vibrations. Petersburg’s Elizabeth Baker played here. This 50 foot ceiling, all this lovely hardwood, these tall windows forever stained with the impressionism of clouds-what sound and light has touched them, bounced off them, all these years? What have they witnessed? I imagine the correspondence of that idea in the coalescence, in this old First Church of Christ Scientist, of everything ever herein performed. The founder of Christian Science wrote that all the dead were but one fabric. She believed not in ghosts, but in Spirit. Photo by Jack Spottswood, 1934, courtesy Florida State Archives,
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