Mark Clavier

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Mark Clavier is an American living in the U.K. where he serves as Residentiary Canon of Brecon Cathedral and Director of Convivium: an initiative to connect faith with local environments, heritage, and communities. The author of four books, Mark is currently working on a book about his Afro-Caribbean slave-owning heritage.

Recent Essays

“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.