The Baptist Courier garnered five prizes recently from the South Carolina Press Association.

The awards, which recognized work published in 2016, were announced March 18 in Columbia.

The Courier’s June issue, with a cover story on Clemson University head football coach Dabo Swinney and other articles related to Father’s Day, took top honors in the magazine or specialty publication category (associate and individual member division) for the second consecutive year.

The magazine also won first-place SCPA awards for faith reporting, feature writing and editorial writing, as well as a third-place award for faith reporting.

Wendy Duke of Spartanburg, as a guest writer, was recognized with a first-place award in editorial writing for “Why I Can’t Sit This One Out” (January 2016), an adapted blog post that recounted her decision to engage publicly in the sanctity-of-human-life debate.

In that same issue, managing editor Butch Blume received a third-place faith-reporting award for his story about Duke’s daughter, Savannah: “15-year-old lauded for her right-to-life senate testimony.”

Blume also won a first-place faith reporting award for a March story about mobile home missionaries Grant and Amber Hinson (“Loving ‘the People Nobody Wants,’ ”) and a first-place feature writing award for his Father’s Day profile, “ ‘All In’ with Dabo Swinney on Faith, Family and the Fundamentals of Life.”

The awarded stories can be read at BaptistCourier.com.