Addiction and the Twelve Steps: History, Spirituality and Reception

3 credits

This course studies the Twelve Steps as a development in the modern history of Christianity and American religious culture. It situates their emergence within nineteenth- and twentieth-century moral discourses on alcohol, as well as rising attention to religious experience. We will read the texts of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) as a historical archive and an intentionally non-religious spiritual literature. This will allow us to consider their re-appropriation by explicitly Christian spiritual writers. The course will also attend to the pastoral reality of addiction, and the Steps as a practical tool of recovery.