![]() The wording there was the same as in the Sentinel: It appeared as an epigraph on and was partially repeated in the body of the article, and Reinhold Niebuhr was discussed, but no connection was made between the prayer and Niebuhr.Īlthough she did not link up prayer and theologian in her article, Wygal was clearly associated with Niebuhr. ![]() I was able to verify that article, “On the Edge of Tomorrow,” in The Woman’s Press of March 1933. The Santa Cruz Sentinel of March 15, 1933, quoted Winnifred Crane Wygal: “Oh, God, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and insight to know the one from the other.” The newspaper gave as its source an article by Wygal in The Woman’s Press, a publication of the National Board of the YWCA. By searching GenealogyBank, I found two 1933 articles (March 21 and March 25) in the Richmond Times-Dispatch recording the prayer’s use by two women speaking respectively to a local Young Women’s Christian Association board meeting and an annual meeting of the Family Service Society.Ī slightly earlier occurrence of the prayer was yielded by a search of. When, in the course of that work, I came to one of the most celebrated of all sayings, the Serenity Prayer, I found examples of its use back to 1936 by searching ProQuest Historical Newspapers and Google Books as well as NewspaperArchive.Īfter articles in The New York Times and Yale Alumni Magazine and resulting media coverage launched the Serenity Prayer origin controversy, I enhanced my repertoire of electronic resources with additional newspaper archives. ![]() In the Yale quote compilation that I edited, I applied the same computer-assisted techniques to tracing the provenance of famous quotations and proverbs. Now the OED has to a large extent shifted from random reading to focused searches of digital text collections. I have long been a contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, which for more than a century relied on citations of word use, taken from reading of precisely dated publications, as the basis for its definitions and etymologies. My work on the Serenity Prayer spun off from research conducted for my book The Yale Book of Quotations (Yale University Press). I have recently found five versions of the prayer from 19, the earliest of which I believe establishes to a high degree of confidence that Reinhold Niebuhr did originate the Serenity Prayer. The list of eight has grown to several times that number. The Times then published a second front-page story reporting my reaction to the new information.ĭuring the past five years, I have continued to research the genesis of the Serenity Prayer using the same kind of powerful databases of historical newspapers and books that I used to collect my initial eight pre-1943 occurrences. The year after the Times story, Stephen Goranson of the Duke University Library posted a message on the American Dialect Society’s Internet discussion list stating that he had found an occurrence of the Serenity Prayer in a 1937 Christian student newsletter, which referred to “the prayer attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr.” I quickly contacted the Times editors and alerted them that, in my view, Goranson’s discovery had significantly increased the likelihood that Niebuhr was, indeed, the original author. It is because I relied on the Heath story as the authoritative dating of the theologian’s first use of the prayer that, when I discovered eight instances of the prayer’s being printed in newspapers and books between January 1936 and April 1942-none of which mentioned Niebuhr-I concluded that he appeared to have drawn unconsciously on earlier versions of unknown authorship. In no less than 13 places in the book, she characterized Heath in 1943 as the place and time of composition. Sifton’s 2003 book The Serenity Prayer featured a specific account of her father’s writing the prayer for a Sunday service in Heath, Mass., in 1943. ![]() My assertion engendered considerable controversy, and was strongly contested by Niebuhr’s daughter, the eminent publisher Elisabeth Sifton. The prayer was the Serenity Prayer, commonly quoted as follows: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” Its adoption by Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs has propelled it to worldwide renown. The theologian-philosopher was Reinhold Niebuhr. In 2008 I made the front page of The New York Times by asserting that the greatest American theologian of the 20th century, who was also perhaps the greatest American political philosopher of the 20th century, probably did not originate the most famous and beloved prayer of the 20th century.
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