The Serenity Prayer: “Theologians will tell you that Reinhold Niebuhr’s magnum opus was his magisterial two-volume work of theological ethics, ‘The Nature and Destiny of Man’ (1941-43). Intellectual historians will talk about the way Niebuhr shaped his students at Union Seminary in New York; they will speak of the profound influence that Niebuhr, who was always at pains to yoke theology to the social problems of his day, had on Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian martyred by the Nazis.

But by far, his best-known work is a short verse that has come to be called the Serenity Prayer. It’s possible you’ve seen it on a T-shirt or a coffee mug or a billboard; if you’re a 12-stepper, its recitation may have become part of your daily discipline. I first encountered it on a poster in the office of Mrs. Bennett, my middle-school guidance counselor. Though different prayers (and different manufacturers) have played variations on the theme, Niebuhr’s original text goes like this: ‘God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.’

In her eloquent new book, Niebuhr’s daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, takes readers through the grim but not unhopeful days of the prayer’s composition. Written in 1943, the Serenity Prayer is not a cute bromide. It is Niebuhr’s pained but unflaggingly faithful response to the horrors of the 20th century – not least the Holocaust – condensed and distilled into one short plea.

The creation of the Serenity Prayer is really the occasion for, rather than the plot of, Sifton’s book. For rather than merely recounting the history of a prayer, Sifton gives us a portrait of American intellectual culture at mid-century. The book opens in Heath, a small Massachusetts farming village where the Neibuhrs summered. (And indeed, Sifton has drawn a cast of characters for whom “summer” is a verb. Sifton herself emerges as the type who can be called, without irony, a Radcliffe woman of a certain generation.) Close family friends included W.H. Auden, Supreme Court Justice and FDR adviser Felix Frankfurter and liberal Protestantism’s most formidable preacher, the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick. In the Niebuhr home – which was part Algonquin round table and part Hyde Park drawing room – political talk was more than chatter. Sifton grew up fluent in denunciations of fascism, capitalist excess and Jim Crow.” —New York Newsday