Clarence Jordan's Sermon in the Soil

In 1942, Clarence Jordan — a Greek scholar with a doctorate in New Testament — did something his colleagues found baffling. He left a promising academic career and bought 440 acres of depleted farmland outside Americus, Georgia, to start an interracial farming community called Koinonia Farm. In the Jim Crow South, this was not merely countercultural. It was dangerous. Night riders shot up the farm's roadside market.…