Mark Clavier

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Mark Clavier is an American living in the U.K. where he serves as Canon Theologian of the Diocese of Swansea & Brecon, Bishop’s Chaplain, and vicar of St Mary’s Brecon. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio Wales and is the Director of Convivium: an initiative to connect faith with local environments, heritage, and communities. His latest book, A Pilgrimage of Paradoxes: A Backpacker’s Encounters with God and Nature, is a theological reflection on his many walks in Wales.

Recent Essays

Stories of Healing and Wholeness: An Appreciative Engagement with Wendell Berry’s The Need to be Whole

Mark Clavier - November 21, 2022

Brecon, Wales. Stories are a necessary part of healing and wholeness. I don’t just mean a story we may like or we tell ourselves...

Is Progressivism Sustainable?

Mark Clavier - February 18, 2022

We cannot sustain the rhetoric of conservation and sustainability if our society remains fixated on ideas of economic and technological progress. We cannot become a people who cherish the land and seas if we continue to expect an unsustainable degree of material affluence.

“Magically Turning White”: A Family Story of Slavery, Racism, and Redemption

Mark Clavier - July 26, 2021

Mark Clavier describes coming to terms with the fact that he is a white Southerner descended from enslaved Africans who subsequently became slave-owners. Reflecting on an ancestry containing triumph and shame, he discovers how closely the commendable and corrupt can be intertwined.

A Pastoral Inheritance: James Rebanks and a Tribute to Our Late Cathedral Sacristan

Mark Clavier - February 5, 2021

There is much wisdom contained in English Pastoral for suffering churches. If the last fifty years have shown that innovation and modernization aren’t the solution to our ill-health, they have also made a nostalgic return to yesteryear an impossibility.

Augustine the Agrarian

Mark Clavier - October 12, 2020

The world is God’s farm, his flourishing garden. We find ourselves as his workers in his fields, called to cultivate the land and the souls, minds, and bodies of ourselves and our neighbors—in this way all can be “fruitful and multiply.”

Baldwin, Buckley, and Berry on Racism and the World Order

Mark Clavier - July 24, 2020

Drawing from both Baldwin and Berry allows us to see that the racist and imperial policies of the past continue to do immense social, economic, cultural, and ecological damage around the globe. Racial injustice is among other things an ecological issue.