So who wrote the serenity prayer

A few years ago, I decided to lose an argument with a few folks who contended that the "Serenity Prayer" made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous was originally written by St. Francis of Assisi. The real author of the prayer, I knew, was Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the greatest Protestant intellectuals of the 20th Century, but for the sake of the general stability in the room—Franciscans can be quite territorial—I kept quiet.

Now, apparently I was wrong, too, or at least, not quite right. A scholar has found several similar prayers that were actually published prior to the "official" publication date of Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer in 1943. The various candidates:

The original, canonical form attributed to Niebuhr in 1943: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."

A prayer by Miss Mildred Pinkerton printed in the Syracuse Herald, January 16, 1936: "O 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."

A prayer by Miss Constance Leigh, from the Hartford Courant, October 27, 1938: "I would in closing this brief report voice the hope that we may have the courage to change what should be altered, an understanding and serenity to face what cannot be changed, and the wisdom to recognize one from the other."

I get the point of the critics, but I don't know whether this changes anything. Niebuhr can still be credited with the particular linguistic formation that we canonically understand as the Serenity Prayer. Neither of the two "originals" are the same as the Serenity Prayer that many today recognize. In fact, while they share a similar structure, they lack the simplicity, grace, and power of Niebuhr's particular formulation. In this regard, we can say that Niebuhr indeed "authored" the prayer, in the same way that Henry Ford "invented" the assembly line, even though he incorporated the techniques from meat packing plants.

“Reinhold Niebuhr was a very honest person who was very forthright and modest about his role in the Serenity Prayer," said Fred R. Shapiro, the Yale librarian who found the two earlier versons. "My interpretation would be that he probably unconsciously adapted it from something that he had heard or read.”

Niebuhr may have borrowed the basic sentiment behind the other two prayers—though we would have to establish that he knew these prayers to determine whether he was truly inspired by them—or his prayer may simply reflect the intellectual and spiritual climate of American mainline Protestantism during the Depression and Second World War. (The latter may be more accurate.) But we shouldn't be surprised by this. There is no such thing as a "new idea," only old ideas that are used and reformulated to meet the needs of a particular time. This is what Niebuhr was doing, and we still do the same today.

Political update

An interesting slide show of updates of Norman Rockwell's famous "Four Freedoms" paintings.

And the campaign quote of the day:

Mr. McCain’s campaign also faced criticism last month when his new Web site carried the slogan, “A Leader We Can Believe In,” seen as similar to Mr. Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In.” And House Republicans were embarrassed in May when it turned out their new catchphrase, “The Change You Deserve,” had been used to market an antidepressant drug.

Nice. Going well.

Health care economics—and ethics

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have presented their health care plans, both of which emphasize variations on a market-based approach. McCain's plan seems to emphasize tax credits supplemented by assistance to help high-risk patients gain insurance, while Obama's plan seems to provide a more controlled market in which insurance providers are required to insure high-risk patients and there is a broader safety net, particularly for children. But in many ways, the language that they use and their basic ideas—"portability," "prevention," "reducing costs," "streamlining"—are the same.

Of course, neither knows exactly how they will pay for the plans. The New York Times suggests that McCain's program will most likely cost more than he says it will, though Obama's is probably not any better.

In a significant book, Charles Dougherty has noted the ways in which health care economics is an ethical issue as well. That is, we need not only to understand the efficiency of the health care market but also the unexamined, and perhaps more fundamentally disturbing, ethical question that the American health care system often presupposes: Is health care a fundamental human right, and if so, what does that mean for the delivery and access of health care in the United States?

Dougherty examines a variety of perspectives, not to choose the "best" but to survey the options:

• Utilitarianism: Is health care a means for ensuring the greatest happiness for the greatest number of persons? If so, then the most aged and infirm must be allowed to die or perhaps euthanized.
• Egalitarianism: Does the intrinsic value of human life require us to do absolutely everything to preserve and extend it? If so, then the health care system risks becoming bloated and unsustainable.
• Libertarianism: Should people be allowed to exercise the maximum amount of freedom in making health care decisions through the development of a free market? If so, one should be prepared to live with inequalities in access that arise from mental deficiencies and economic disparities.
• Contractarianism: Should the health care system emphasize a level of access to care that all reasonable persons believe to be "fair"? If so, one must commit oneself to an on-going discussion about what constitites "fair" in a pluralistic society that has shown itself to be unable to begin such a discussion on anything, let alone come to an agreement.

Two campaigns, two problems

John McCain is shaking up his campaign team, and not a moment too soon, since he's been foundering for weeks, if not months. But before Republicans get psyched, they need to read this paragraph:

Mr. McCain is uncomfortable firing people or banishing them entirely. His orbit remains filled with people who have been demoted without being told they are being demoted, like Mr. Davis, who continues to hold the title of campaign manager even as Mr. Schmidt manages the campaign. Yet, Mr. McCain inspires uncommon loyalty in those who serve with him — hence the willingness of Mr. Murphy to consider coming back into the McCain campaign, despite his own rather brutal history of enmity with Mr. Davis.

Loyalty is a good thing, of course, but the hesitancy of McCain to take a direction—any direction—out of fear that it would alienate a staffer or close friend suggests executive weakness. Would he run the White House this way? That sort of management style is the stuff of Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, neither of whom are worth imitating.

On the other side, Bob Herbert suggests that Obama's new penchant for realism is sparking cynicism among those who bought into his idealism. This is a potential problem insofar as it seems to dampen the enthusiasm of Obama's supporters, enthusiasm that Obama is counting on to boost voter turnout in states where working class white voters distrust him.

Partly, the problem emerges from the way the Democratic party's long-held position as the party of idealistic identity politics. While this gets the faithful out, it's also a losing position. Clinton went one way. Obama is searching for another. He may not need to find that vision to win; McCain's mismanagement of his campaign may cede the field. But if he does, watch out.

Three days

On Sunday, the New York Times reported on the discovery of a tablet—or, rather, the interpretation of a tablet that was bought about a decade ago—that suggests that the Christian tradition of the death and resurrection of the Jewish Messiah was neither as new nor as scandalous as previously thought.

Most likely discovered in the Dead Sea region, the tablet's authenticity is taken to be credible, and like the more famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which give us an idea of what a radical group of Jews called the Essenes were doing and thinking in the years around the birth of Jesus, it is thought to add to our understanding of the intellectual climate of the time.

The tablet, apparently written following the death of what a group of Jews thought as a candidate for their long-awaited Messiah, contains 87 lines of text, many of which are indecipherable or difficult to read. The English translation of the text (in Word) makes no effort to hide the difficulties in reading or in interpretation. The lines that are getting the most attention are the following:

19. In three days you shall know, that(?)\for(?) He said,
20. (namely,) yhwh the Lord of Hosts, the Lord of Israel: The evil broke (down)
21. before justice.

as well as line 80:

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words “L’shloshet yamin,” meaning “in three days.” The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is “hayeh,” or “live” in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”

The discovery and interpretation of the text is interesting, but the larger question is what these lines actually mean. Speaking conservatively, they suggest that the motif of a 3-day resurrection was part of the Jewish tradition, though how widespread this belief was is unclear. We shouldn't be surprised by this, since the Gospels draw heavily from the imagery of the Jewish prophets to show that Jesus was precisely who he said he was. (The Book of Jonah, for instance, also has the prophet in the belly of a whale for three days before he is spouted back on land.) As a result, this leads credence to the historical-political reading of the Gospels that many contemporary scholars support:

Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesus’ day as an important explanation of that era’s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.

But if the idea of a resurrection was part of the Jewish canon before Jesus arrived, what accounts for the hostility and violence of the Jews toward the early church? Something deeper must have been going on. The early church, perhaps, was more than just literary tropes or a political cause.