The joke went over their Christian heads...

Pretty sure Macdonald's cancer didn't leave him wondering, in the end, if he'd rushed to judgment about OJ's guilt.  How Walther sneaked this one by the NYT editors (hard up for essays about Christians, I guess....), I don't know.  But Mr. Walther is projecting here.  And killing the smart jokes.  If you think he wasn't kidding about OJ even in the end, you probably should not be writing about analyzing another man's spirituality and life, nevermind the style of humor he practiced in his craft...

By the end of his life, Mr. Macdonald seemed to have abandoned even his well-known animus against O.J. Simpson. 'All he’s guilty of to me,' he said on a Comedy Central program in 2019, was of being 'the greatest rusher in the history of the N.F.L. Maybe I was the greatest rusher — to judgment.'...