I take the title of this essay from the 1722 English work of Daniel Defoe which is a fictionalized account of the last great Bubonic Plague outbreak in London of 1665. I am writing this piece in September of 2020 when the entire world is in the midst of its own “Great Plague” caused by the COVID 19 pandemic and…

John Huey responds to a letter from the London Islignton Agnostic, Atheist, Freethinkers group about “The God Word” pamphlet…

Delusion can come in many forms. It can be based on the mostly harmless false hope and wishful thinking of a child-like desire to prove that somethings not true when it obviously is, the more serious self-deceptions of the active alcoholic whose lack of boundaries and self-assessment lead to further self-destruction or, in the truly terrifying…

This was quite an onerous task that took some time to complete and it is, given how bad a book this is, something I would not have taken on had the errors and misrepresentations embodied in this work been of less consequence…

Sometimes, when people fully make contact, they look each other in the eye and see things finally falling into place…

Personally, as regards my own sobriety, I have always lived with my primary purpose first and foremost in mind. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens regarding that primary purpose without complete and total abstinence from alcohol and non-medically necessary and prescribed drugs…

Just taking the first free breath at a recovery meeting can be liberating. A second breath, at a Secular Recovery meeting, often involves an exhalation of words and phrases where both thought and expression is freed from any intimations of the divine and the implied restrictions, often encountered elsewhere, of someone else’s arbitrary list of “things to do” that…

My earliest experiences in recovery started the same way that most of these journeys begin, at a meeting.

Going down a short flight of stairs into a very large church basement with smoke thickened air (it was, after all, early 1987 when there were still smoke-filled rooms) and seeing an old DC drinking buddy at the bottom of those…

In Secular Recovery it can become possible, while never completely losing sight of it, to relegate our primary purpose to a secondary position while debating the future of the organization…

I was most pleased that my schedule and some professional matters came together in a way that allowed me to attend the Widening the Gateway regional conference for secular AA members in Olympia WA on January 16. There were 70 very engaged members of the fellowship there which was more than double the 30 members the organizers had originally anticipated…