A nuanced look at positive thinking?

Positive thinking is “at once the most widely embraced and the most frequently reviled philosophy in America”, according to editor and writer Mitch Horowitz.

In his Huffington Post article 10 Positive-Thinking Books That Might Change Your Life the author gives us a preview of what to expect in his soon-to be-released book One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (Crown, Jan 2014).

While I am no expert on the majority of the books he lists, I owe my health – and probably my life – to book number nine of his top ten, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. I would also have to say that I credit its metaphysical, spiritual and Christian ideas with the wider spectrum of wellbeing I have enjoyed, including purposeful employment, sufficient supply and enduring relationships.

I don’t regard any of this as the result of positive thinking per se. I see such practical good as evidences of a universal divine reality brought to light through a consistent spiritual discipline. That is, through gaining a better understanding of God’s nature as infinite, divine Love and by striving to follow Jesus’ command to more consistently live that love in responding to the needs of others. So I’m grateful to Mitchell for his article’s more nuanced sense of the place Science and Health has in the history of America’s on/off relationship with positive thinking…

His review of Mary Baker Eddy’s key text begins: “This is not a positive-thinking book in any conventional sense, but none of the literature mentioned here would have been possible, or at least would read the same way, without the Christian Science founder’s influence…”

You can read the rest of his Science and Health review in his thought-provoking article, and we can all look forward to finding out more when the book comes out in 2014.