Another front in the intellectual-property wars: Who gets the royalties for prayers on coffee mugs?

In the warm and frothy bubble bath that is American spirituality today, it’s hart to think of anything quite as familiar and comforting as the mini-homily known as “ Footprints in the Sand” For anyone who has somehow manage to avoid the gantlet of Footprints mugs, calendars, greeting cards, and mouse pads- to name just a few of its incarnations- the poem is a soft focus retrospective that imagines life as a walk on the beach with Jesus, a pilgrimage traced by two sets of footprints, the Savior’s and the Narrator’s. The reverie is interrupted by the narrator’s shock that at his lowest moments there was just a single set of footprints, indicating that Jesus had bolted when he was needed most. Catharsis comes with the lord’s soothing assurance that he did not abandon his follower during the dark night. Rather, there was only one set of prints because” it was then that I carried You” Or as Jesus put it elsewhere, O ye of little faith”

The story can be read generously as a haiku of Christian belief vanquishing doubt, or perhaps as proof that there is more unalloyed emotion in religion than in any other field of human expression. But this being America, you can’t get something for nothing, and that goes for piety as much as widgets. Hence, the rather unseemly legal wrangling over this irenic tale, which is pitting three main contenders (there are apparently dozens of pretenders) for the right to claim authorship of “Footprints”-along with millions of dollars in licensing fees on all those Footprints tchotchkes.