Mercadante, Linda A.

Victims & Sinners

Spiritual Roots of Addiction and Recovery

Linda A. Mercadante

More than one million Americans participate in Alcoholics Anonymous groups. Addiction recovery groups such as A.A. often rely heavily on religious themes, offer-ing a form of spirituality as a way to deal with life's problems. Many recovery groups, however, borrow selectively from theology because the full Christian doctrine of sin can be alienating for those in recovery. Linda Mercadante offers a theological cri-tique of addiction recovery programs and proposes an alternate view of addiction that avoids both excessive blame and excessive victimization.

This book is for pastoral counselors, clergy, laypersons, and recovery group members wanting to reassess addiction recovery from a theological perspective. It offers a wake-up call to the church both to establish recovery groups and to construct a lan-guage for better dialogue.

This book provides a provocative historical and theological analysis of Alcoholics Anonymous and the twelve step paradigm of recovery. The author addresses the age old controversy of sin versus sickness with all of the inherent theological and pastoral concerns. Her book will provide a new lens through which chaplains, counselors and pastors can look in order to define more clearly for themselves the salient issues in the relationship between the Christian tradition and the addiction-recovery model"

-Robert H. Albers, Professor of Pastoral Theology,

Luther Seminary

"Mercadante's work represents a serious, thoughtful, provocative, passionate, and necessary theological corrective to the implicit theology of Twelve-Step programs. She rightly sees the construct of addiction as having conflated many different forms and levels of human suffering. Thus she leaves open the possibility of a variable diagnosis and treatment tailored to the specific unhealthy response."

-Charles E. Brown, Professor of Pastoral Care, Union Theological Seminary in Virginia