Sportscaster Ernie Johnson Jr. on Faith and Fatherhood

If you were neighbors outside Atlanta with Ernie Johnson Jr. and his wife, Cheryl, you’d soon learn they are the parents of six children. They’ve adopted four of them. Three have special needs, and one suffers from muscular dystrophy, a fatal disease [more on Johnson’s family here].

But the rest of us know Johnson mostly as the Emmy-winning studio host of Inside the NBA on TNT, where he works alongside Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, and Shaquille O’Neal. You’ll also see him working for Turner and CBS on the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, Major League Baseball, and the PGA Championship.

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Most recently he’s the author of Unscripted: The Unpredictable Moments that Make Life Extraordinary (Baker). In this book he takes us behind the scenes of his family and studio show and also his outspoken Christian faith, including his struggles as a father and husband and survivor of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He joins me on The Gospel Coalition Podcast to discuss the ups and downs of family and career, including his much-shared commentary following the 2016 presidential election.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.

But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.

To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

Download your copy today »

Collin Hansen serves as vice president for content and editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition, as well as executive director of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and has written and contributed to many books, most recently Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation and Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential. He has published with the New York Times and the Washington Post and offered commentary for CNN, Fox News, NPR, BBC, ABC News, and PBS NewsHour. He edited Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor and The New City Catechism Devotional, among other books. He is an adjunct professor at Beeson Divinity School, where he also co-chairs the advisory board.