The Cotton Patch Gospel recasts the stories of Jesus and the letters of Paul and Peter into the language of the mid-20th century South. Born out of the Civil Rights struggle, these now classic translations of much of the New Testament bring the far-away places of Scipture closer to home: Gainesville, Selma, Birmingham, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. As Jordan once wrote, "While there have been many excellent translations of the Scriptures into modern English, they still have left us stranded in the long-distant past. We need to have the good news come to us not only in our own tongue but in our own time. We want to be participants in the faith, not merely spectators."

In honor of what would have been Clarence Jordan's one hundredth birthday and the seventieth anniversary of Koinonia Farm, the first Clarence Jordan Symposium convened in historic Sumter County, Georgia, in 2012, gathering theologians, historians, actors, and activists in civil rights, housing, agriculture, and fair-trade businesses to celebrate a remarkable individual and his continuing influence. Clarence Jordan (1912-1969), a farmer and New Testament Greek scholar, was the author of the Cotton Patch versions of the New Testament and the founder of Koinonia Farm, a small but influential religious community in southwest Georgia. Roots in the Cotton Patch, Volume 1 contains Symposium presentations addressing Clarence's influence as a storyteller and contextual preacher and prophet, his pacifist witness in a violent and segregated South, and the contemporary meaning of his life's work in Christian community. Uniting these powerful essays is the obvious impact Jordan's life has had on so many. His life and work continue to inspire a new generation of activists, seminary students, and people in search of the meaning of Christian community.

In this modern day translation of Paul' message, his letters are taken out of the study and stained-glass sanctuary and placed under God's skies where people toil, laugh, cry and wonder. The Cotton Patch Version is a very colloquial, southern translation.

The Cotton Patch Gospel, by Koinonia Farm founder Clarence Jordan, recasts the stories of Jesus and the letters of Paul and Peter into the language and culture of the mid-20th century South. Born out of the Civil Rights struggle, these now classic translations of much of the New Testament bring the far-away places of Scripture closer to home: Gainesville, Selma, Birmingham, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. As Jordan once wrote, "While there have been many excellent translations of the Scriptures into modern English, they still have left us stranded in some faraway land in the long-distant past. We need to have the good news come to us not only in our own tongue but in our own time. We want to be participants in the faith, not merely -spectators." More than a translation, The Cotton Patch Gospel continues to make clear the startling relevance of Scripture for today. These editions come complete with new Forewords and a new Introduction by Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller. Smyth & Helwys Publishing is proud to help reintroduce these seminal works of Clarence Jordan to a new generation of believers.

When Jesus delivered his parables, he lit a stick of dynamite, covered it with a story about everyday life, and then left it with his audience. By the time his hearers fully unwrapped the parable, Jesus and his disciples were long gone. Clarence Jordan essentially retells these powerful parables in the language of the South in order to place modern readers in that same first-century situation. Properly understood, these Cotton Patch stories can liberate us into the kingdom of God from the cultural prisons of religion, wealth, and prejudice. After Jordan's death in 1969, Bill Lane Doulos took up the task to combine these Cotton Patch Version parables with appropriate excerpts from Jordan's sermons and with his own commentary which does well to pull everything together. In the end, Doulos and Jordan call readers into true discipleship, challenging them to explore the demands of kingdom life on a whole new level.

This minor classic" of the narrative theology movement proposes to use biography as a way of doing theology, rather than using biography to set forth models of exemplary living to inspire the faithful. By looking at the lives of four significant persons (Dag Hammarskjold, Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarence Jordan, and Charles Ives), the author discovers a theology that is adequate to account for the kind of lives these persons lived. This unique approach to theology is applicable to any religion, but the author has chosen to work within his own Christian tradition in this book. The book concludes with suggested methods by which the work of doing theology biographically can be carried further.