A Course in Miracles

A Course in Miracles presents itself in three parts: a Text setting out its theory, a 365 day Workbook for Students, and a shorter Manual for Teachers. Helen Schucman, a professor of medical psychology at Columbia University, said that beginning on October 21, 1965 an inner voice she identified as Jesus told her, this is a course in miracles, please take notes, and that she went on taking dictation through 1972. Her colleague William Thetford, who had urged her that there must be another way of working together after a period of friction between them, transcribed her shorthand and encouraged the project throughout. At Schucman's request her authorship was withheld from readers until after her death in 1981.

The Course borrows Christian vocabulary, sin, salvation, atonement, the Holy Spirit, and reassigns it inside a nondualist psychology: the physical world is described as a mistaken perception rather than a real creation, and a miracle is defined as a shift in perception rather than a change to physical events. Forgiveness, understood as recognizing that no real harm has occurred because the world in which it seemed to occur is itself an error, is presented as the Course's central practice. The book explicitly states it is one version of a universal curriculum, not the only one, and does not ask readers to adopt any particular religious affiliation.

The Foundation for Inner Peace, formed by Judith Skutch, later Skutch Whitson, published the Course's first hardcover edition in 1976. Kenneth Wapnick, a psychologist who had joined Schucman and Thetford in editing the manuscript, went on in 1983 to found a second organization, the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, to teach the material along more traditionally Christian lines than some other students preferred. The book gained a much wider audience after Marianne Williamson discussed it on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1992, and related titles built on it, including Gerald Jampolsky's Love Is Letting Go of Fear, sold in the millions.

The Foundation for Inner Peace and the Foundation for A Course in Miracles sued the New Christian Church of Full Endeavor and its Endeavor Academy in the late 1990s for reproducing large sections of the Course without permission. The defendants argued that Jesus, not Schucman, was the Course's true author, and that a deity's words cannot be copyrighted. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York did not rule on that theological question. It found instead, in a decision issued October 24, 2003 (Penguin Books USA v. New Christian Church of Full Endeavor, 288 F. Supp. 2d 544), that the Foundation had lost its copyright in the original 1976 through 1992 printings by failing to include a proper copyright notice under the law then in force, placing that first edition text in the public domain, while copyright in the revised Second Edition and Schucman's separate poetry remained valid.