Newsboys lawsuit exposes underlying finances of CCM business
This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on May 5, 2026. In the summer of 2001, I risked getting expelled by Bob Jones University for the chance to watch Michael W. Smith in concert at a Franklin Graham crusade at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C. This was just one year removed from the university […]
Trump, Harvard and Bob Jones University: The resurrection of racism
This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on April 21, 2025. Donald Trump’s threat to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University may be novel, but it is not new. It is, in fact, a resurrection of a previous kind of discrimination. There’s one other time in American history when a private university lost its […]
Conservatives’ agenda for America is starting to read like my Bob Jones University student handbook
This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on February 29, 2024. Perusing the news is beginning to feel like reading my Bob Jones University handbook a quarter century ago. Every page unveils another clutching of control that mortifies and confounds until the reader doesn’t know whether to laugh, cry or rage. This isn’t a new […]
Old wounds and power hierarchies are in fashion at Bob Jones University
This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on April 3, 2023. After consolidating his power over the Bob Jones University board of trustees last week, Chairman John Lewis won his face-off against university president Steve Pettit. Pettit, who has served as president of the ultra-conservative school since 2014, had given the board an ultimatum before […]
Doomsday Vault created to preserve conservative preaching against cancel culture
This article originally appeared on December 16, 2022 at Baptist News Global. In a world where peer-reviewed evolutionists are taken seriously and LGBTQ people are treated as peers, Bob Jones University and Sermon Audio have come up with a conservative evangelical counter-offensive known as The Vault. The two organizations have joined forces to build a doomsday vault […]
How a student’s fashion design project upset the created order at Bob Jones University
This article originally appeared on January 18, 2022 at Baptist News Global. Let’s call this controversy Wrap-Coat-Gate. Trustees and administrators at Bob Jones University recently grew so alarmed over a wrap coat designed by a student for a class project that they publicly called the student’s work sacrilegious, blasphemous, dishonoring to Jesus, offensive, and egregious. […]