Word: prayerfulness
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...while You're at it, enable my heirs to serenely withstand claims that I didn't write this prayer - which, it should be remembered by all, was not composed with a byline in mind...
...Friday, the New York Times broke a story about the famous "Serenity Prayer," part of which is cited above. For decades, it has been routinely attributed to the great Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He wrote it, according to most accounts, for a sermon he gave in the summer of 1943. So certain is his daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, of its provenance, that she put out a book in 2003 about its connections with her father's views on peace and war. But the Times reports that an article in the Yale Alumni Magazine by a law librarian and quotation expert there...
...wrote the iconic prayer - and should we care...
...first question seems not immediately answerable. Sifton, Niehbuhr's daughter, says that her father preached around the country in the 1930s and could have introduced the prayer in his travels, prior to '43. The Yale Alumni article's writer, Fred Shapiro, told the Times he felt Niebuhr might have unconsciously lifted it. Quizzed on its origins in his lifetime, the theologian said, " "Of course, it may have been spooking around for years, even centuries, but I don't think so. I honestly do believe I wrote it myself." You decide...
...there appear to be limits, especially when a poem or prayer or image has proven itself as a cultural byword and/or moneymaker; and when the alleged author is old or dead and represented by an heir. The Times reports that Niehbur himself, although convinced of his authorship of the Serenity Prayer, graciously qualified his claim. His daughter, intellectually and professionally invested in her book as well as his legacy, come across as considerably more vehement. Likewise, it was not Mary Stevenson, who died in 1999, but her son who brought the "Barefoot" suit...