Awards

Herman Frederic Lieber Award - 1988

About Glenn F. Chesnut, Jr.

Glenn F. Chesnut was Professor of History and Religious Studies at Indiana University in South Bend for 33 years, where he was one of the most popular teachers, winning IU's Herman Frederic Lieber Award for excellence in teaching in 1988. He wrote a number of books on the history of Christianity as well as on the spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous and the twelve step program. Other books include The Higher Power of the Twelve-Step Program: For Believers & Non-believers and Changed by Grace: V. C. Kitchen, the Oxford Group, and A.A. (which is included in Bishop's List of the Fifty Most Important Books tracing A.A.'s history from the last hundred years).

He was brought up in San Antonio, Texas, and Louisville, Kentucky, and received degrees from the University of Louisville (chemistry and nuclear physics) and Southern Methodist University (a B.D. in divinity), as well as a doctorate in theology from Oxford University in England.

After his retirement from Indiana University in 2003 he became Director of the Hindsfoot Foundation, which publishes books on the moral and spiritual dimensions of recovery, and has been devoting his full time to working with alcoholics and addicts. He and his wife Sue lived in South Bend at the edge of the University of Notre Dame campus.

Chesnut died in July 2020.