A Magnificent Obsession: The Autobiography of William Ragsdale Cannon

William Ragdsale Cannon was not your everyday kind of prelate and his autobiography pretty much sums up what we all thought of him as a man and as a religious figure. Anybody who dropped by Cannon Chapel at Georgia's Emory University made it a point to see if "Billy Cannon" was presiding, no matter if you were Jimmy Carter, or Pope John Paul II, or just Joe Schmoe, he had a wise word and a prayer for everyone. In a way he was kind of a Hollywood preacher, and his book makes no bones about his attraction to the spotlight. His famous friends made him feel good about himself and good about the Lord, and so everyone wound up a winner. He always joked about LSU's Billy Cannon, the Heisman Trophy winner with whom he was sometimes mistaken. Often enough credit card companies would send him approved credit cards with big, big limits, and obviously they did not know that he didn't have a big salary but subsisted on whatever the Lord and the Methodists would provide. He would joke that the disgraced football player Billy Cannon would wind up paying all of his bills, and he hinted that in this way poor Billy would wind up slipping in through Heaven's back door after all. He wasn't a joker per se, but as anyone knows who sat through any of his sermons, he knew how to leaven the serious word of Christ with a little myrrh and frankincense. I can attest that Emory was a tough place to work at unless you loved the very young people, some of them quite immature, who attended college there, and Bishop Cannon tells several stories about his counseling the troubled youth of Georgia, some quite moving, in this many-layered autobioghraphy. Published only after Cannon's 1997 death, MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION is no Jane Wyman-Rock Hudson love fest, but instead a readable, if rather dull, story of a man who loved Georgia, Christ, and the a good meal served up hot, as well as one of the most unforgettable characters ever to grace a bishopric.