The Scholar Who Chose the Dirt Road

Clarence Jordan earned his PhD in Greek New Testament from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1939. He could have claimed a comfortable professorship, a respected pulpit, a life among Louisville's well-spoken-of. Instead, he loaded his family into a car and drove to Americus, Georgia — one of the poorest counties in America — and founded Koinonia Farm.

There, Jordan lived among sharecroppers, Black and white, farming side by side in the Jim Crow South. Neighbors shot at their roadside produce stand. The Ku Klux Klan firebombed their property. Insurance companies refused them coverage. Local churches barred their doors against them.

Jordan translated the New Testament into what he called the "Cotton Patch Version," rendering Jesus's words into the red-clay dialect of rural Georgia. When he came to Luke 6, he didn't have to imagine what Jesus meant by "Blessed are you who are poor" or "Woe to you who are rich." He had left the woe behind and walked straight into the blessing.

Jordan died in 1969 in a small shack on the farm, owning almost nothing. But from that same patch of Georgia soil grew Habitat for Humanity — a movement that has housed millions.

Jesus stood on a level place and spoke a truth that still unsettles the comfortable: the kingdom's math runs backward. What the world calls loss, God calls blessed.