Reinhold Niebuhr
American theologian and author of the Serenity Prayer.
Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian who taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York from 1928 to 1960 and became one of the most influential public theologians of 20th-century American Protestantism. He wrote major works on Christian ethics, political theology, and the relationship between faith and history, including Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941-1943). His best-known contribution to Christian prayer is the Serenity Prayer, written for a sermon around 1943 and never copyrighted, which through its adoption by Alcoholics Anonymous and twelve-step programs has become one of the most widely recited modern prayers in the English language. Niebuhr's daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, documented the prayer's origins in her 2003 book The Serenity Prayer, settling decades of disputed attribution.