Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance
Edited by Richard C. Goode
Imprint: Cascade Books
Will D. Campbell was a Baptist preacher in Taylor, Louisiana, for two years before taking the position of Director of Religious Life at the University of Mississippi from 1954 to 1956. Forced to leave the university because of his ardent Civil Rights participation, Campbell served on the National Council of Churches in New York as a race relations consultant. Campbell worked closely with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, and Andrew Young towards bettering race relations. Campbell's Brother to a Dragonfly earned him the Lillian Smith Prize, the Christopher Award, and a National Book Award nomination. The Glad River won a first-place award from the Friends of American Writers in 1982. His works have also won a Lyndhurst Prize and an Alex Haley Award.
"Will Campbell still has much to teach us all. Quirky and courageous, Christian and contrarian, his life of love and labor on behalf of civil rights-and plain civility to those in need-deserves a wider hearing than it usually receives. Many thanks to Richard Goode for spreading the word."
--Douglas A. Sweeney,
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
"In this remarkable collection, Will Campbell unmasks the 'powers that be,' envisions an alternative order, and calls Christians to radical practices of resistance and reconciliation. The witness in these pages will call forth many adjectives: 'Unrealistic!' 'Outrageous!' 'Scandalous!' 'Shocking!' 'Foolish!' Most often, however, another word is best: Gospel. Unsettling and essential reading for contemporary Christians.
--Charles L. Campbell
Duke Divinity School
"Will Campbell was supposed to be a Southern Baptist minister, a farmer, a docile rower of the white church's missionary boat; instead, he became a guerilla Protestant comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable across the South and beyond. He still preached, but seldom beneath the steeples . . . Historian Richard Goode, a close observer of Will Campbell's ministry and writings, has selected and introduced in this volume a distillation of the man's best work, and organized it into the two most compelling frames of Campbell's life: reconciliation and resistance. If they seem contradictory, well, so is Campbell, and the church, and the world."
--John Egerton
author of The Americanization of Dixie