Ernest Kurtz

Ernest Kurtz was the Harvard-trained historian of American religion whose Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (1979) established the scholarly study of the AA movement and whose later work placed the Twelve-Step tradition in conversation with the wider Christian spiritual heritage. Trained as a Catholic priest before leaving ministry for historical and pastoral work, Kurtz read addiction and recovery as phenomena belonging not to medicine alone but to the religious history of the soul — a reading the Seba tradition recognizes as kin to its own.

The title of his major work names the central claim: the alcoholic’s fundamental error is the claim to be God — to control, to be the center, to need nothing outside the self — and the First Step is the surrender of that claim. Not-God is the condition of ego-death that begins recovery. His later The Spirituality of Imperfection (with Katherine Ketcham) extended the thesis: the recovery tradition is an inheritor of the spiritual-imperfection literature that runs from the Desert Fathers through the medieval mystics through Kierkegaard. See kurtz-not-god.

Ernest Kurtz

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