Glenn F. Chesnut,
who earned a doctorate in theology at Oxford University and has had a long
career teaching religion and history at multiple American universities, has
published Father Ed Dowling: Bill Wilson’s Sponsor (iUniverse, July
2015).
“This is the story of Father Ed Dowling, S.J.,
the (non-alcoholic) Jesuit priest who served for twenty years as sponsor and
spiritual guide to Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Father
Ed said that the graces he received from meeting Bill Wilson were as great as
those he had received from his ordination as a priest, and Bill in turn
described encountering the Jesuit as being like a second conversion experience,
where he could feel the transcendent presence of God filling the entire room
with grace...”
There is much information about the
early years of Alcoholics Anonymous and includes Matt Talbot in Chapter 7, which
can be read at https://books.google.com.pe/books?id=AthFCgAAQBAJ&dq=fr+ed+dowling&source=gbs_navlinks_s
The entire text can be read at http://hindsfoot.org/dowtext.pdf, with Chapter 7 beginning on page 76.