Kent Dunnington > Quotes

“Addiction is-like all sin-a form of idolatry because it elevates some proximate good to the status of ultimate good, a status that belongs to God alone. But addiction is uniquely alluring, uniquely captivating and uniquely powerful because its object comes so close to making good on its false promise to be God.”
― Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice

“Addiction is in fact a kind of embodied cultural critique of modernity and the addict a kind of unwitting modern prophet. The church has a great stake in listening to such unwitting prophets. If the church will listen, it will be led to an examination of how its own culture contributes to the production of addiction, whether it offers an alternative culture and what such an alternative culture would require.”
― Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice

“remind us that our desire for God is trivial”
― Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice

“Like the prophets of old, today's addicts may remind us that our desire for God is trivial and weak, and our horizons of hope and expectancy are limited and mundane.”
― Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice

“Perhaps, unlike the addict, we have not demanded an all-consuming purpose, a coherent and integrated life, and an ecstatic participation in some all-sufficient and transcendent good.”
― Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice

“We have settled instead for a life of respectability, and we respond to our boredom, loneliness and internal disorder through distraction and diversion.”
― Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice