Preview of AA Historian Dick B.'s Radio Interview of Guideposts Editor and Author Edward Grinnan of New York

Preview of Dick B. Radio Interview This Wednesday of Christian Recovery Leader, Guideposts Editor, and Author Edward Grinnan

Dick B.

Edward Grinnan, Editor in Chief of Guideposts Magazine will be our International Christian Recovery Coalition guest this Wednesday, June 13, 2012, on Christian Recovery Radio.com.
Grinnan will be interviewed by A.A. Historian Dick B. Grinnan has just returned from Akron, Ohio, where he was the keynote speaker at the A.A. Founders Day Celebration at the Gate Lodge of the Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens where Henrietta Buckler Seiberling (Ohio's Lady with a Cause) introduced Dr. Bob to Bill Wilson and thus started the birthing of Alcoholics Anonymous in Akron in 1935.

Grinnan was in Akron in the company of Norman Vincent Peale honoree Ron Glosser to help mark out the influence of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale on Dr. Bob Smith of Akron and Smith's reading and circulation of Peale's The Art of Living. Also to celebrate the close relationship of Dr. Peale with AA cofounders Rev. Samuel M. Shoemaker, Jr., Dr. William D. Silkworth, and Bill Wilson.

One or two critics of Dr. Peale have endeavored to label Bill Wilson and AA with Peale’s religious views. However, among the many Norman Vincent Peale influential ties to Alcoholics Anonymous were his remarks about Alcoholics Anonymous in his famous book The Power of Positive Thinking and his book The Positive Power of Jesus Christ - where Peale tells how his good friend Dr. William D. Silkworth informed his alcoholic patients that the "Great Physician" Jesus Christ could cure them of their alcoholism. Peale was also a good friend of  A.A. itself and of A.A. historical figures Bill Wilson, Dr. William Duncan Silkworth, and Rev. Samuel M. Shoemaker, Jr., Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in New York.

The fact is that the roots of the original A.A. program in Akron had little, if anything, to do with Peale’s work; and the roots of the New York Big Book 12-Step program were planted largely from the views of Dr. Silkworth on alcoholism and the cure of it by Jesus Christ and the views of Professor William James of Harvard that the key to a cure was a vital religious experience (of the type James had studied and confirmed were valid). Furthermore, the easily recognized and proclaimed major influence on Wilson’s Big Book and Twelve Step writings was the body of writings, sermons, and teachings of Rev. Shoemaker.

Edward Grinnan was a low-bottom alcoholic who, with the help of A.A. and God, was lifted out of his desperate plight and eventually into his executive and editorial post at Guideposts. Grinnan had managed to be a Yale graduate in drama with an MFA degree. He worked at writing plays and then, of course, as an editor. And he has just published and will tell us about his new book, a memoir whose title and contents will be covered in the forthcoming interview.