FORGOTTEN FATHER:

Beyond serenity: Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer has been taken up by everyone from Alcoholics Anonymous to Hallmark to the rapper 50 Cent. But the true legacy of one of 20th-century America's greatest religious thinkers has been all but forgotten. (William Lee Miller, 12/14/2003, Boston Globe)

REINHOLD Niebuhr was the most important religious thinker about politics that the United States produced in the 20th century, or possibly ever. For a time, from the `30s into the `60s, this writer, preacher, and activist had a unique impact not only in the religious world but also on American public affairs. He was the leading Protestant voice against both Hitler and isolationism before World War II, and a key influence on such Cold War realists as George Kennan, who called Niebuhr "the father of us all." He was also a major inspiration to Martin Luther King Jr. and legions of social activists.

But today the public memory of Niebuhr -- where he is remembered at all -- is filled, appropriately enough, with ironies. (Niebuhr was big on ironies.)

One might have guessed that this lifelong left-liberal in politics would be often invoked by political conservatives, from Henry Luce (who once had him on Time magazine's cover) to Michael Novak (who wrote in 1972 about "Needing Niebuhr Again") to David Brooks, who recently proposed in The Atlantic Monthly that if America is to have a "hawkish left," Niebuhr should be its hero. One might also have guessed that many of Niebuhr's fellow left-liberals would forget him or dismiss him as a rigid Cold Warrior and total wet blanket to their hopes and dreams, or that many of those keeping alive the work of this Protestant preacher would be folk who otherwise had no truck with preachers. (According to historical legend, when the New York City Council voted in the late `70s to name the corner of Broadway and 120th Street "Reinhold Niebuhr Plaza," all the Jews on the council, but none of the nominal Christians, knew who he was.)

But perhaps the biggest irony is that the most widely known product of Niebuhr's pen isn't a magisterial passage from a book such as "The Nature and Destiny of Man" but a short prayer he composed in the dark days of World War II, for a summer church service in Heath, Mass., where he and his family spent summers. His daughter Elisabeth Sifton tells the story in her new book, "The Serenity Prayer", a memoir of her father and his world and of his most famous utterance's strange afterlife.

The prayer, as he gave it one Sunday, went as follows: "God, give us the 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."