Emma Curtis Hopkins

Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925) was an American spiritual author and leader. She was involved in organizing the New Thought movement and was a primary theologian, teacher, writer, feminist, mystic, and prophet who ordained hundreds of people, including women, at what she named (with no tie to Christian Science) the Christian Science Theological Seminary of Chicago. Emma Curtis Hopkins was called the "teacher of teachers" because a number of her students went on to found their own churches or to become prominent in the New Thought Movement.

Emma Curtis Hopkins was born Josephine Emma Curtis in Killingly, Connecticut, in 1849 to Rufus Curtis and Lydia Phillips Curtis. She married George Irving Hopkins on July 19, 1874. Their son, John Carver, was born in 1875 and died in 1905.

Hopkins was initially a student of the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy, who claimed to have found in the Christian Bible a science behind the alleged healing miracles of Jesus which could be practiced by anyone. She would afterwards (see below) leave Christian Science to develop her own more eclectic form of metaphysical idealism, known later as New Thought with, like it, certain mystical traits of Gnosticism, though Hopkins felt much freer to make affinities with Theosophy and a wide variety of Eastern teachings.

Differing from Eddy's lead in speaking of God as both Mother and Father, Hopkins conceptualized the Trinity as three aspects of divinity, each playing a role in different historical epochs: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Mother-Spirit or Holy Comforter. Hopkins believed (as did Eddy, though not as parochially) that spiritual healing was the Second Coming of Christ into the world, and this was the hallmark of her early work. Hopkins also believed more specifically that the changing roles of women indicated their prominence in the Godhead, signaling a new epoch identified by the inclusion of the Mother aspect of God.

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