Clarence Jordan

Using a corpus of family letters, his FBI file, and a series of interviews, Frederick L. Downing portrays Clarence Jordan as a pioneer (on the frontier of the New South), a prophet, and a moral exemplar. As a New Testament Greek scholar and founder of Koinonia Farm, there were two distinctive poles to the prophetic nature of Jordans life and work: one which sought to critique and dismantle the status quo, and the other which attempted to evoke a new way of being. Jordans critique of church and society was profound and increasingly radical. In this biography Downing shows that Jordan was, like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi, a homo religious--a religious innovator of the highest order who had universalizing vision. As a religious genius, Jordan was a cultural worker whose own search for faithfulness and human wholeness was interwoven with the quest to redeem his region.