William Ragsdale Cannon

William Ragsdale Cannon (April 5, 1916 – May 11, 1997[1]) was the dean of Candler School of Theology (1953-1968) and an American bishop of the United Methodist Church, elected in 1968.

For other uses, see William Cannon (disambiguation).

Birth and family

William was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the son of William Ragsdale and Emma McAfee Cannon. Bishop Cannon was raised in Dalton, Georgia. He never married.

Education

William graduated from the University of Georgia in Athens in 1937, and from Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut in 1940. He earned his Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 1942.

Ordained and academic ministry

Cannon served churches in Oxford before joining the faculty of Candler School of Theology, Emory University in 1943. From 1953 until 1968 Cannon served as the dean of the seminary. In the mid-1960s Dean Cannon defended Emory's retention of Religion Professor Thomas J.J. Altizer, a proponent of the death-of-God position. This position later came to be known as the God is Dead controversy. Cannon also guided Candler through racial integration.

Cannon was regularly elected as a delegate to U.M. Jurisdictional and General Conferences, beginning in 1948. During the administration of Jimmy Carter, Cannon served as an unofficial envoy of the President.

Cannon had the high honor of being a Protestant observer at the Vatican II Council of the Roman Catholic Church in Rome in 1965. Later, as a bishop, he also observed the Extraordinary Synod of the R.C. Church in 1985. He became friends with Pope John Paul II, who sent a statement to be read at Cannon's funeral in 1997.

Episcopal ministry

Cannon was highly influential in the Council of Bishops of the U.M. Church. For example, he delivered the episcopal address at the 1984 General Conference, the highest honor conferred on a bishop by his/her episcopal colleagues. As a bishop, Cannon stressed Christian education and evangelism, and was known for his classically orthodox, Wesleyan positions.

As a bishop he was assigned, successively, to the Raleigh Episcopal Area (1968–72), the Richmond Area (1970–72), the Atlanta Area (1972–80), and the Raleigh Area again (1980–84). Cannon also served as a member of the board of trustees at Emory, Asbury College, and Duke University. He was a member of the executive committee of the World Methodist Council for a time, as well.

He retired to Georgia in 1984, becoming bishop-in-residence at the Northside U.M.C. in Atlanta. In 1994 he was one of the principal founders of The Confessing Movement of the U.M. Church. This movement focused on the Church's mission to "retrieve its classical doctrinal identity, and to live it out as disciples of Christ."

Bishop Cannon died in 1997 at the Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta. He is buried in West Hill Cemetery in Dalton. Cannon Chapel at Emory is named in his honor.

Selected writings
  • The History of Christianity in the Middle Ages
  • The Journeys After Saint Paul
  • The Theology of John Wesley: With Special Reference to the Doctrine of Justification, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1946
  • Evangelism in a Contemporary Context, Nashville, Tidings, 1974.

Biographies
gollark: Pretty much all of the algorithms reduced size by ~50% or so and the difference is maybe 5% or so between them all, so this is definitely premature optimization, but bees?
gollark: I tested four different compression algorithms and brotli did fairly well; I would have used zstandard but the node bindings for it are awful, and brotli actually did do better on small inputs.
gollark: For example, it stores created/updated timestamps in a way which allows them to be looked up more quickly, makes it faster to look up the latest revision of stuff, allows me to do compression (I implemented brotli compression to reduce storage requirements a lot), and allows revisions to have data and represent stuff other than "the page content changed".
gollark: The new version *is* better, even if it involves something like 70 lines more code.
gollark: I've reworked minoteaur's design a bit again because productivity is BEES and happens to other people.```sqlCREATE TABLE pages ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, name TEXT NOT NULL, updated INTEGER NOT NULL, content TEXT NOT NULL);``` I went from that small and thus uncool database thingy to this:```sqlCREATE TABLE versions ( vuuid TEXT PRIMARY KEY COLLATE BINARY, rawSize INTEGER NOT NULL, encoding TEXT, data BLOB NOT NULL);CREATE TABLE pages ( title TEXT PRIMARY KEY, created INTEGER NOT NULL, updated INTEGER NOT NULL, latestVersion TEXT NOT NULL REFERENCES versions(vuuid));CREATE TABLE revisions ( ruuid TEXT PRIMARY KEY COLLATE BINARY, page TEXT NOT NULL REFERENCES pages(title), timestamp INTEGER NOT NULL, type TEXT NOT NULL, data TEXT NOT NULL, -- JSON version TEXT NOT NULL REFERENCES versions(vuuid));CREATE INDEX revisions_page_ix ON revisions(page);```

References
  1. Wolfgang Saxon (May 13, 1997). "William R. Cannon, 81, Methodist Theologian". The New York Times.
  • The Council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church
  • InfoServ, the official information service of The United Methodist Church

See also
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