Fannie Brooks James

Fannie Brooks James (1854–1914) was a co-founder of Divine Science and, with her sisters Nona Brooks and Aletha Brooks Small, one of the principal architects of the movement’s Denver branch.

Raised Presbyterian and living in Pueblo, Colorado, she was the first of the Brooks sisters to take Malinda Cramer’s class in February 1889, an experience tied to a healing in the family that turned the sisters toward metaphysical teaching.

With Cramer’s permission they adopted her term “Divine Science” for their own work. Fannie began teaching healing and Bible classes in her own Denver home in the 1890s. In 1898 the sisters incorporated the Divine Science College in Denver to train teachers and practitioners, ordain ministers, and organise churches; Fannie James served as president of the college for about fifteen years and co-launched its magazine, Fulfillment, in 1902.

She became the movement’s chief systematic teacher, and her instructional writing — most notably Truth and Health, published in 1917, after her death — codified Divine Science doctrine into a graded course of lessons still used in Divine Science churches.

Her central teaching device is the Divine Science “Statement of Being,” a foundational affirmation of the omnipresence and perfection of God/Mind that the student returns to as the ground of all practice.