Reinhold Niebuhr never became serene about injustice and the misuse of power. Where serenity comes into social ethics is in understanding and accepting where we begin. We cannot change the particular form that injustice takes in our time. We might have made great abolitionists, attacking the cruelties of plantation slavery, but the present challenge lies in the complex interaction among immigration policy, welfare programs, workers' rights, and global commerce. UNCLE TOM'S CABIN will not unravel those complexities. We cannot change the unique mix of evils that we have to face. Health care and the social safety net demand attention, but we had better turn some of our energy to the questions of terrorism and civil liberties. We cannot even change our own perspective on these problems, the blend of prejudices and insights and blind spots that we bring to these issues from our own particular social, economic, and ethnic origins. Serenity is not a matter of getting comfortable with doing nothing, but of doing what we can without being paralyzed by anxiety about where we have to start or blinded by defensiveness about what we haven't done.

So there is a kind of political serenity that frees us for change, just as there is a false kind of personal serenity that frees us from it. But there is also a false kind of political courage that substitutes readiness to impose change on others for the courage that accepts it for ourselves. Perhaps that is where the connection between prayer and politics becomes most important. To seek courage to change may be nothing more than a declaration that I have a plan and a warning that, if I am able, I will impose it on the world. To pray for wisdom to know what to change opens me to judgment. It is a confession that at the point where I begin this prayer my plans are at an end, and I have to find direction for the future in a wisdom I do not yet possess.

Can we really pray that kind of prayer today? Can we pray it politically? In personal life, I may have self-destructive habits that I need to face and conquer. But in politics, it is all too clear that there are others who would conquer us if they could. Can we pause to ask for wisdom before we answer that challenge? And in any case, isn't the evidence of history that we already have a plan that works? Those of us in the developed West with functioning market economies and secular, liberal democracies seem already to know how to produce what everyone else apparently needs. We are not where we were in 1943, when we were at war to vindicate democracy against totalitarian alternatives that had come within reach of overrunning the world. We are not even where we were in 1963, when rival superpowers faced each other with equal and opposite claims about the human future. If there's a judgment here, hasn't it already been pronounced on the alternatives to freedom and prosperity? We need political courage and a kind of political serenity perhaps, but don't we already have wisdom?

Of course, it's precisely at such a moment that wisdom becomes politically relevant. Because there are no eternal truths in politics, it's just when we are most successful that we need to start asking what needs to be changed. If we ask the question soon enough, if we face the limits of our starting point with a serenity that pre-empts anxiety and defensiveness, we may receive wisdom that we do not yet possess to show us what we need to do next and what we need to do differently.

Then, and only then, will it be safe to pray for courage to change what needs to be changed.

Robin W. Lovin is the Cary Maguire University Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University and the author of REINHOLD NIEBUHR AND CHRISTIAN REALISM (Cambridge University Press).