The words of a great American theologian

God, give me grace to accept with serenity

the things that cannot be changed,

Courage to change the things

which should be changed,

and the Wisdom to distinguish

the one from the other.

Living one day at a time,

Enjoying one moment at a time,

Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,

Taking, as Jesus did,

This sinful world as it is,

Not as I would have it,

Trusting that You will make all things right,

If I surrender to Your will,

So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,

And supremely happy with You forever in the next.

Amen.

This prayer, adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous ("one day at a time"), is often referred to as the Serenity Prayer or the Twelve-Step Prayer -- since so many recovery groups look to it for solace and encouragement.

The man credited as the author is a Missourian, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). If you find yourself traveling I-70 west from St. Louis, about 50 miles out from the city is the little town of Wright City, home to a little more than 3,000 souls. I seem to spend a fair amount of time passing the Wright City exit on my way to Columbia, where my youngest daughter is in her freshman year at Stephens College.

When I pass the sign, I try to remind myself that two of the greatest theologians America ever produced came from this small Warren County hamlet: the aforementioned Reinhold and his younger brother, H. Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962).

There is another point of connection for me -- beyond the Niebuhrs being from Missouri. They also attended Eden Seminary, which is where I took my master's and my doctorate. H. Richard took a Ph.D. from Yale and Reinhold never earned a terminal degree.

Time magazine called Reinhold Niebuhr, posthumously, "the greatest Protestant theologian in America since Jonathan Edwards." He won the 1964 Presidential Medal of Freedom. President Obama has written of his admiration for him -- and that praise has resulted in renewed interest in Niebuhr's writings.

Niebuhr was known for something called Christian Realism, a philosophy that countered the so-called Social Gospel, which argued that humankind should -- and, more to the point, could -- rid itself of social evils by collective effort.

The answer to society's ills, the Social Gospel asserted, was education. The more educated a society, the less evil it becomes.

The Social Gospel movement, always more popular with clergy than laity, foundered on the rocks with the rise of Nazism. Adolf Hitler was surrounded by Ph.Ds, laying bare the folly that education will always produce goodness and morality.

Reinhold Niebuhr believed the human heart was a dark place, that the Kingdom of God could not come on earth because societal structures were inherently corrupt. Human perfection, advanced by the Social Gospel crowd, was -- for Niebuhr -- an illusion.

In a world in which terrorism seems a daily news story, with long-simmering hatreds expressed in violence and with our own military now launching a round of airstrikes against the intractable ISIS in Syria, the wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr's long-ago words is hard to ignore.

Not bad for a small-town Missouri boy, huh?

Dr. Jeff Long is executive director of the Chateau Girardeau Foundation, a teacher of Old Testament at SEMO, and a part-time pastor.