Christian Science Monitor

Mary Baker Eddy stands alone in the annals of history as the discoverer of a scientific method to reinstate in modern times the long lost element of Christ healing on a broad, practical, and near commercial basis. She is also honored as the founder of an established science that makes her discovery available to humanity under the name of Christian Science. She is further recognized as the founder and President of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in which she personally taught thousands of students the science involved in Christian Metaphysical healing. Her title as President was never relinquished. She also bears the honorable title of Pastor Emeritus of the Christian Science church which she organized under the authority of its Church Manual, authored by her. Finally, in her mid seventies, long after people normally retire, she set out to establish the Christian Science Monitor that quickly became one of America's leading international newspaper.

Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior editor at In These Times, an investigative journalist and essayist with credits in many dozens of newspapers and magazines nationwide, including The Nation, Salon, Santa Fe Reporter, Utne, and the Christian Science Monitor. She is at work on a book about women in prison (Seal Press/Avalon). Her articles on social issues with a particular emphasis on criminal justice, ethnicity and gender have garnered a dozen Society of Professional Journalists Western Washington regional awards. Talvi was honored in 2005 and then again in 2006 to receive a PASS award (from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency) for a magazine feature on the impact of Three Strikes sentencing on African American men, and another on the privatization incarceration trend for ITT. Born in Helsinki, Finland, and raised in Hollywood, California, Talvi earned her BA with Honors in Ethnic Studies in 1991 from Mills College in Oakland, California. She was then admitted into the first graduate program in Women Studies at San Francisco State University, completing her master's thesis in 1993 about Israeli and Palestinian women. Since 1996, Talvi has been a full-time writer, reporting from areas as diverse as the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, New Mexico, Los Angeles, the Puget Sound, as well as Western and Eastern portions of Washington State. Internationally, she has also reported from Europe, the Caribbean, Canada and Mexico. She currently lives in Seattle. Talvi's essays, investigations and articles have appeared in the following book anthologies: The W Effect: Bush's War on Women, The Feminist Press; Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor, Routledge; Economics Now, Oxford University Press; Body Outlaws: Young Women Talk About Body Image and Identity, Seal Press; Readings for the 21st Century. Allyn & Bacon/Simon & Schuster Education Group.