Apr 26, 2016
This episode, the fourth in the Mormon Matters series on Addiction and Recovery features the stories and insights of two wonderful people, James Cottrell and Bill Casper, whose journeys of addiction and recovery intersect in nearly every moment with their Mormonism. All guests in this series have been LDS, and what was just said above about the intersection between their addictions and their religion applies in many ways to all of them, but in this episode we make it far more a focus than in the previous three. And it yields interesting results, especially on the topic of "confession" and "getting right" with one’s church--something the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous suggests but that often does not receive much emphasis in contemporary AA circles. In this case, James and Bill speak openly about how important this step was for them in their recovery and confidence that it will continue--recoveries that saw previous re-lapses (in James’s case, largely, he feels, because he had skipped this step). Raising this question here led to a conversation about confession to ecclesiastical leaders in general that went places that we don’t often talk about in the Mormon Matters community of listeners and similar circles. More than in the previous episodes in the series, James and Bill also go into the spiritual transformations they have undergone in the process of their recovery, the power of the various steps in facing addiction, the importance of meeting with others going through similar things, and much more. Warning: This episode features "tire meets the road" Christianity.