GOD GRANT US… –
June 11, 2025 – “Serenity” is not a word many would use to describe the world right now. Perhaps that is why this four-line version of a prayer continues to be uttered as often as it has been since it was first penned. It was conceived in a little stone cottage in Massachusetts, by theologian and professor Reinhold Niebuhr around 1932.
It was soon printed on cards and distributed to American military personnel in conflict and circulated by the National Council of Churches. It became even better known after being adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous in 1941, after an early AA member saw it in a New York newspaper obituary.
Niebuhr never capitalized on the success of his prayer. His daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, who died in 2019, wrote in her 2003 book, “The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War,” that her father didn’t believe prayers should be copyrighted. He never profited from the Serenity Prayer’s popularity, other than Serenity Prayer kitsch his friends gave him — coffee cups, wood carvings and needlework.
