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What is the Oxford Group?

by A Layman with a Notebook 
Oxford University Press 1933

The Oxford Group is where Bill W. first found sobriety prior to meeting Dr. Bob in 1935 and the eventual founding of AA. Both Dr. Bob and Bill, as well as many early AA members attended Oxford Group meetings in the early day. One of the many tools from the Oxford Group were the Four Absolutes, Honest, Unselfishness, Purity and Love.
Forward by L W Grenstead

 

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What is The Oxford Group?  

Original Second Printing, Dec. 1934

rare book is considered to be the basic text of the Oxford Group and is of special interest to Alcoholics Anonymous. The Oxford group and Frank Buchman, introduced the  Four Absolutes (absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute        unselfishness, absolute love), the beginnings of the Twelve Steps.  Bill W. and Dr. Bob were members....you know the rest. original New York edition is rare

Oxford University Press, New York, 1936, Hardbound with blue covers, 7.5" x 5",  132 Pages.

This is an excellent and rare 64 year-old history of Dr. Frank Buchman and the Oxford group, which was to be the inspiration for Alcoholics Anonymous.  (The book was written before AA came into being!)  As is well known, Bill W. stated that the AA tenets of self-examination, acknowledgment of character defects and making amends for harm done all derived directly from the Oxford Group.  As you read this superb volume, the origin of the Twelve Steps becomes clear.

THIS EXCELLENT OLD OXFORD BOOK PROVIDES  ABSORBING READING, AND IS A FASCINATING ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGINS OF AA

Grensted also Wrote the
Psychology of Religion

Excerpt from "The Psychology of Religion":
"THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION"

At the beginning of the twentieth century the psychology of religion suddenly became a centre of interest to the general reader. This was almost entirely due to the genius of one man, William James, whose Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, startled and excited a public which extended far beyond theological circles. Not only were they brilliantly and amusingly written, in a style far removed from the dry technicalities of formal psychology, but they were also highly original and provocative, at once challenging to orthodoxy and sympathetic to religion.

The student of the psychology of religion is, as things stand today, in the very difficult position that there is no one psychological theory, still less any one psychological text-book, to which he can turn with any assurance that it contains even a minimum of accepted opinions. He must in fact become a psychologist himself, and make his own choice between the views set out with so much conviction and so few common principles, before he can begin the process of applying his psychological knowledge to the elucidation of religious practice and belief. This involves the necessary consequence that it is quite impossible to study the psychology of religion by reading books directly upon that subject and no others.
By L. W. GRENSTED

York University York England
Dept of Archaeology

The Environmental Archaeology Unit houses a substantial collection based around specimens mostly collected in the 1920s and 1930s by Canon L.W. Grensted, one of the most eminent malacologists of his generation.