![]() One of the reasons that Martin Luther King Jr. Megapastor Rick Warren built up much of his "Purpose-Driven" organizational base by putting his sermons up on the web so that others could use them. Pastors constantly borrow one another's sermons, usually without crediting them. Until recently, however, the theological world remained something of a gotcha-free zone. The Enlightenment, with its fascination with the precise material origins of everything, also contributed to the Google-gotcha culture we live in today. In the Renaissance, the concept of individual "genius" developed as part of a larger project of extracting individual identity out of the medieval communal ideal during the Romantic age a couple of hundred years later, when individualism reached a level close to fetishism, the importance of authorship grew correspondingly. Two trends in Western thought eroded this attitude. ![]() "Piety," notes Prothero, "trumped authorship." Besides, the real author reigned in heaven. Did it matter? Certainly not to the early Christians, who put four different and arguably contradictory accounts in their Bible. "Probably." That is to say, Luke probably incorporated Mark's gospel into his own. Most modern critics regard the Gospels of the new Testament as being mutually dependent. Prothero brings up what is perhaps the foremost example of this kind of tolerance. The other is that the real author of pious art whether literary or artistic used to be considered to be God, who may require fear, awe or compassion, but not royalties. One reason for this is that the concept of ownership of intellectual property is only a few hundred years old. Stephen Prothero, the head of the religion department at Boston University, says that the controversies would not have made the front page (or the front papyrus) in the past. But the Serenity and Footprints controversies raise the issue of whether we could or should apply a different standard to similar questions if they involve religious texts? Neither of them had renounced her own claim on the poem at the time of the article.īoth these cases the page-one treatment in the paper of record and the lawsuit are very much a piece with an environment where the web and data banks make it ever easier to compare texts and we generally take a fairly hard line on plagiarism in journalism and the publishing industry. He asserted that the women had each received more than a million dollars in royalties for its use. The RNS recorded that the son of a woman named Mary Stevenson brought suit in May against two women he claimed were inappropriately claiming authorship of the poem, which he said his mother had written in the 1930s and copyrighted in 1984. In May the Religion News Services ran a similar article about the devotional poem "Footprints" ("One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord."). The Serenity frenzy, if one may call it that, is not unique. It's our answer to the second question should we care that will establish us very much as creatures of our own era and its mind-set. I honestly do believe I wrote it myself." You decide. ![]() Quizzed on its origins in his lifetime, the theologian said, " "Of course, it may have been spooking around for years, even centuries, but I don't think so. The Yale Alumni article's writer, Fred Shapiro, told the Times he felt Niebuhr might have unconsciously lifted it. Sifton, Niehbuhr's daughter, says that her father preached around the country in the 1930s and could have introduced the prayer in his travels, prior to '43. The first question seems not immediately answerable. So who wrote the iconic prayer and should we care? ![]() But the Times reports that an article in the Yale Alumni Magazine by a law librarian and quotation expert there will present his discovery of versions of the prayer unattributed to Niehbuhr from as early as 1936. So certain is his daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, of its provenance, that she put out a book in 2003 about its connections with her father's views on peace and war. He wrote it, according to most accounts, for a sermon he gave in the summer of 1943. For decades, it has been routinely attributed to the great Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. On Friday, the New York Times broke a story about the famous "Serenity Prayer," part of which is cited above. and, while You're at it, enable my heirs to serenely withstand claims that I didn't write this prayer which, it should be remembered by all, was not composed with a byline in mind. Follow grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change courage to change the things I can.
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