By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
Northeast Texas has had a strong connection to a leading evangelical center of higher learning, Dallas Baptist University. From 1979 to 1987, W. Marvin Watson, a former chief of staff for President Lyndon Johnson and long-term resident of Daingerfield, served as the university’s president. In 2009 DBU dedicated its landmark chapel, an 8-million-dollar gift from Lonnie (Bo) and Patty Pilgrim of Pittsburg. Five years later, one of the top Presidential Scholars of NTCC honors history, Noah Griffin, a member of the All-USA, top-twenty national team, transferred to DBU.
This spring, Luke Mitchell McCraw, another top NTCC Presidential Scholar, is the winner of DBU’s exclusive Christian Leadership Scholarship for $12,000. McCraw was the film scholar behind NTCC’s Caldwell-Award winning film on the traveling preachers of early Texas. The NTCC sophomore proceeded to provide numerous presentations of his work on this topic, both locally and at the meetings of the Walter Webb Society in San Felipe, the Texas State Historical Association at College Station and the meeting of the Great Plains Honors Council in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
McCraw has also presented his work at local prayer breakfasts, and was a regular participant for two years in the Monday Bible Study conducted at NTCC by Reverend Mike Kimmel of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Mount Pleasant.
A psychology major, McCraw developed a work under NTCC honors professor, Dr. Karyn Skaar, on gray-scaling as a means to alleviate phone addiction, and won $50 and second place at the second-annual Red River Symposium at Texarkana this past 3 May.
McCraw topped off his experience at NTCC by winning $400 and the McGraw-Hill Scholarly Poster contest on 10 May. He is the son of Robby and Amy McCraw of Mount Vernon, and the grandson of Michael and Sharon Dennehy of Greenville, who were a devoted part of the administrative team of NTCC from 1985 to 2000.
