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Campbell, the son of a farmer, was ordained as a minister by his local Baptist congregation at age 17. He attended Louisiana College, then enlisted in the Army during World War II. After the war, he attended Wake Forest College, Tulane University, and Yale Divinity School. Though he held a pastorate in Louisiana from 1952 to 1954, Campbell has spent most of his career in other settings. In 1954, he took a position as director of religious life at the University of Mississippi, only to resign it in 1956, in part because of the hostility (including death threats) he received as a supporter of integration. He subsequently took a position as a field officer for the National Council of Churches, where he had his closest contact with the Civil Rights Movement. In 1963, Campbell left the NCC to become director of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, which provided a home for his activism in the subsequent years.

This organization published a journal, ''Katallagete,'' the title of which is the New Testament Greek for the [[Saint Paul|Pauline]] phrase "be reconciled," a reference to [[2 Corinthians]] 5:20. The journal featured articles about politics and social change, as understood through the lens of the Christian faith, particularly the [[neo-orthodox]] movement, which Campbell became acquainted with at Yale. Edited by James Y. Holloway of [[Kentucky]]'s [[Berea College]], ''Katallagete'' was published from 1965 until the early 1990s; the CSC relinquished control of the journal to Campbell and Holloway in 1983.

By 2005, Campbell described this last organization in the past tense as “nothing ... a name and a tax exemption and whatever I and a few other people were doing on a given day," and he continued his work on a personal basis among his network of acquaintances. Although remaining a Baptist, he reputedly conducts house church worship services in his home. His home is in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, outside of Nashville.

Civil rights

In 1957, while working for the National Council of Churches, Campbell participated in two notable events of the Civil Rights Movement: he was one of four people who escorted the black students who integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools; and he was the only white person present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Despite these efforts, Campbell later claimed, "I never considered myself ... an activist in the civil rights movement, though a lot of other people considered me an activist." His uncompromising theology has led him to keep his distance from political movements. He has insisted that "anyone who is not as concerned with the immortal soul of the dispossessor as he is with the suffering of the dispossessed is being something less than Christian" and that "Mr. Jesus died for the bigots as well" . These convictions sometimes caused friction between Campbell and other civil rights figures -- for example, when Campbell ministered to members of the Ku Klux Klan. He remarked in 1976, "It's been a long time since I got a hate letter from the right. Now they come from the left." In his book, "The Stem of Jesse', Will profiles Samaria Mitcham Bailey, a young American female of African descent, and her resolve in coping with the racial challenges she faced while matriculating at Mercer University.

Other issues

While Campbell is best known in connection with civil rights activism, he also has taken an interest in other political issues. He participated in protests against the Vietnam War and helped draft resisters find sanctuary in Canada. ELVIS PRESLEY AS REDNECK by Will Campbell In the late 1970s he spoke out against the death penalty, particularly after forming a relationship with John Spenkelink, whom the state of Florida executed in 1979. Campbell has also expressed an opposition to abortion. Akin to the likes of William Stringfellow and Jacques Ellul (who were both contributors to Katallagete), Campbell espouses a fairly strong distrust of government and a belief that people must make their own history. Samaria Bailey is one of the subjects highlighted in his novel, The Stem of Jesse, for her resolve in coping with the hardships she experienced while matriculating at Mercer University. These last two stands sharply distinguish Campbell's thought from that of most religious liberal activists, bringing his views in line with those of more recent postliberal theologians, who denounce liberal (as well as conservative) esteem for civic society as a misplaced faith, an idolatry taking the place of God and Jesus Christ in the Christian life.

This list contains every, or nearly every, book-length work authored primarily by Campbell, but it makes no attempt to list shorter works.

• Race and the Renewal of the Church (1962)
• Up to Our Steeples in Politics (1970, reprint 2005) (with James Y. Holloway)
• The Failure and the Hope: Essays of Southern Churchmen (1972, reprint 2005) (edited with James Y. Holloway)
• ... and the criminals with him ..." Lk 23:33: A first-person book about prisons (1972)
• Brother to a Dragonfly (1977): part autobiography, part elegy for Campbell's brother, part oral history of the Civil Rights Movement
• The Glad River (1982): novel
• Cecelia's Sin (1983): historical novel set among the early Baptists
• The Lord's Prayer for Our Time (1983) (with Will McBride and Bonnie Campbell)
• Forty Acres and a Goat (1986): autobiography (40 acres is about 16 hectares)
• The Convention: A Parable (1988): allegory based on the conflict between moderates and fundamentalists within the Southern Baptist Convention
• Covenant: Faces, Voices, Places (1989) (with photographs by Al Clayton)
• Chester and Chun Ling (1989): children's book, illustrated by Jim Hsieh
• Providence (1992, reprint 2002)
• The Stem of Jesse: The Costs of Community at a 1960's Southern School (1995, reprint 2002): account of racial integration at Mercer University
• "Elvis Presley as Redneck" (1995): address delivered at First Elvis Presley Symposium, University of Mississippi
• The Pear Tree That Bloomed in the Fall (1996): children's book, illustrated by Elaine Kernea
• And Also With You: Duncan Gray and the American Dilemma (1997): a tribute to the Rt. Rev. Duncan M. Gray, whom Campbell calls one of his heroes
• Bluebirds Always Come on Sunday (1997)
• Shugah and Doops (1997)
• Soul Among Lions: Musings of a Bootleg Preacher (1999)
• Robert G. Clark's Journey to the House (2003): a biography of the man who, in 1967, was elected Mississippi's first black state legislator since Reconstruction