Source: The Times-Picayune

On January 29, 2003 The Times-Picayune reported that "New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary on Tuesday formally named its undergraduate college Leavell College in honor of an influential Southern Baptist family that produced three generations of preachers, missionaries, church leaders and two former seminary presidents... Former seminary President Landrum Leavell II, 76, returned from semi-retirement in Wichita Falls, Texas, to the institution he led for 20 years to serve as the focus of the ceremonies. In a chapel sermon he preached a traditional Baptist message that non-Christians are lost if not brought to Christianity; the God of Judaism and Islam is not the God of Christianity, he declared... Returning to the pulpit he periodically occupied for 20 years, Leavell urged seminary students to cling firmly to the Bible and to the Southern Baptist tradition of strict interpretation of its word throughout their careers -- and to expect opposition from within and outside the church for doing so."