Building a personal model of addiction
Review of Recovering People: addiction, personhood and the life of the church.
Recovering People: Addiction, Personhood and the Life of the Church
Quentin Genuis
Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2025.
Quentin Genuis, author of Recovering People, is an emergency physician at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. The Providence Health Care facility serves a wide community including the vulnerable downtown eastside population.
Recovering People’s nuanced title is suitably chosen for this slim volume. In a polarized discussion, it offers a third way to an understanding of addiction and recovery. It is an invitation to reconsider our understanding of personhood as well as the role the church community might take in being a place of healing and encouragement.
In writing this book, Genuis not only brings his medical expertise and experience but also a background in theology and philosophy. The book provides his insights from a Christian perspective into the nature of being human and the complexities of the power of addiction.
Genuis introduces us to a person that comes into the emergency on a number of occasions. This person has a deep desire to be freed from addiction. As a doctor, Genuis learns to stop and look into the eyes of his patients and see them for who they were and are and might become. He calls that the horror and holiness of the emergency ward.
The first part of the book unpacks the two dominant models for understanding addiction: choice or disease. The author offers a more complex understanding that he calls a “personal model.” He offers his understanding of addiction as a (dis)ordering and incontinence, the latter an Aristotelian term for the disconnect between wanting to do what is right, but doing otherwise.
Genuis holds a deep belief that every person is created in God’s image and has a deep longing for meaning beyond themselves. He quotes Augustine, “our heart is restless until it finds rest in you.” He also draws on contemporary theologian James K.A. Smith who posits that our lives reflect what we love, intentionally and unintentionally.
Genuis unpacks two Bible stories in relation to his understanding of addiction. The first is one he intentionally calls “the parable of the Father’s two lost sons” (Lk. 15) and the second is the Gerasene man (Mk. 5). These stories and other passages provide Biblically grounded insights. Genuis acknowledges that the stakes are high when unpacking the complexities of addiction.
The sweep of addiction can cause an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness in everyone touched by its power. Recovering People does not offer a quick, easy answer. It offers a doctor’s heart and desire for readers to grow capacity to consider possibility, and hope for those caught in a web of fear and despair.
The book ends with an invitation to the church community to be the place of refuge and shelter; a place for communal confession, hospitality and friendship for all who need it. A place of belonging and safety, not judgment. A place that invites one to a higher hope. The church community asks more of us, not less. Being this kind of place is ”difficult and costly. Doing so is the necessary task of the church.”
Read part 1 and part 2 of CC‘s interview with Quentin Genuis.
