Academic

From The Department of: ?Anonymous? Was Usually A Woman

By Ann Bartow

This NYT article reports controversy over the authorship of the Serenity Prayer. Below is an excerpt:

… 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.

His daughter Elisabeth Sifton, a book editor and publisher, wrote a book about the prayer in 2003 in which she described her father first using it in 1943 in an ?ordinary Sunday service? at a church in the bucolic Massachusetts town of Heath, where the Niebuhr family spent summers.

Now, a law librarian at Yale, using new databases of archival documents, 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. …

Full post as published by Feminist Law Professors on July 12, 2008 (boomark / email).