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AA pioneer Clarence Snyder was a sponsee of Dr. Bob’s and played a guiding role in the growth of the program in Cleveland. His group was the first to use the name “Alcoholics Anonymous.” In the short clip below, taken from a talk Clarence gave in 1975, he tells the story of Cleveland’s break with the Oxford Group, and the violent reaction of the Akron folks, who felt strongly about their allegiance to the Group.

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What follows is a brief excerpt from the first chapter of Philip Leon’s The Philosophy of Courage or the Oxford Group Way. This bit gives a nice sense of Leon’s prose and philosophical approach to Oxford Group practices. It also offers his description of what it was like to encounter and participate in the Oxford Group. We hope to make much more of this valuable book available soon.

GOD AS POWER
From the most primitive times men have thought of God as power. In the New Testament also “the Power,” Dynamis, is a synonym for God,* while the chief proofs of Jesus’ special connection with God are considered there to be his “powers,” as his miracles are called in the Greek. It is significant that they consist chiefly in the healing of mental diseases (cases of possession) and of physical ills, and that they are most striking and disturbing as evidences of the divine precisely to those people who do not believe in Jesus and have no love for him. In all ages, primitive or late, unless men already love God, they must be faced with the notion of Him as power. For then the only reason they can accept for concerning themselves with God is, to put a crude fact crudely, that they have got themselves into a mess (mental and physical ills) and that they need some extraordinary power to get them out of it. Continue reading →