We’ve all read The Serenity Prayer {God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…} made famous by multiple twelve-step programs, but now it’s authorship appears to be in doubt.
For more than 70 years, the composer of the prayer was thought to be the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of modern Christianity’s towering figures. Niebuhr, who died in 1971, said he was quite sure he had written it, and his wife, Ursula, also a prominent theologian, dated its composition to the early 1940s.
But Fred R. Shapiro, a law librarian at Yale and editor of “The Yale Book of Quotations” has found newspaper clippings and a book from as far back as 1936 that quote close versions of the prayer. The quotations are from civic leaders all over the United States — a Y.W.C.A. leader in Syracuse, a public school counselor in Oklahoma City — and are always, interestingly, by women.
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