A bit more on Gene McCarthy: TNR has a series of essays by McCarthy in this week's edition, including How Artificial Turf is Ruining Baseball.
Mary Mapes is back with her book, this time. Scott Johnson addresses her flagrant lies and distortions. How does she get away with this? Daily Std.
Real Hard Cash: A fine essay on Johnny Cash's career and life by Moore. One quote:
The prison imagery seemed real to Cash because, for him, it was real. He knew what it was like to be enslaved, enslaved to celebrity, to power, to drugs, to liquor, and to the breaking of his marriage vows. He was subject to, and submissive to, all the temptations the recording industry can parade before a man. He was a prisoner indeed, but to a penitentiary of his own soul. There was no corpse in Reno, but there was the very real guilt of a lifetime of the self-destructive idolatry of the ego.
It was through the quiet friendships of men such as Billy Graham that Cash found an alternative to the vanity of shifting celebrity. He found freedom from guilt and the authenticity of the truth in a crucified and resurrected Christ. And he immediately identified with another self-obsessed celebrity of another era: Saul of Tarsus. He even authored a surprisingly good biography of the apostle, with the insight of one who knows what it is like to see the grace of Jesus through one’s own guilt as a “chief of sinners.”
Read entire at Touchstone.
