Books
“This book sharpens our ears and tunes our imaginations to hear and see the ‘magic’ of landscape, people, and God, and to rejoice in it all.”
Mark Clavier examines a series of paradoxes that lie at the heart of Christian faith: eternity and time, silence and words, and wonder and the commonplace. In an intellectual reflection on an overnight trek on Cadair Idris in Wales and other wilderness walks, he explores the oft-hidden connections between faith, society, and nature. Each reflection ranges widely through history, folklore, poetry, philosophy, and theology to consider what these paradoxes can teach us about God, ourselves, and our world. This book invites readers to walk with Clavier in the Appalachians, Norway, Iceland, the Alps, and around Britain as he discovers the ways in which Christianity is profoundly earthed. Order here. To download a free group discussion guide, click here.
“[A] noteworthy exploration of Augustine in relation to contemporary realities and a significant contribution to Christian approaches to consumer culture”
Mark Clavier's book draws on Augustine of Hippo to provide a theological explanation for the success of marketing and consumer culture. Augustine's thought, rooted in rhetorical theory, presents a brilliant understanding of the experiences of damnation and salvation that takes seriously the often hidden psychology of human motivation. From Augustine's perspective, it is only by addressing the sources of delight within consumerism and by rediscovering the wellsprings of God's delight that we can effectively challenge consumer culture. To an age awash with commercial rhetoric, the fifth-century Bishop of Hippo offers a theological rhetoric that is surprisingly contemporary and insightful. Order here.
“This is one of those deceptively little books that you think is going to be a quick read— until you open it and find yourself mulling over pieces and paragraphs, savoring one lovely bit at a time.”
Based on talks given to ordinands in Wales, this book presents the ministry as responding to God's call to be priestly stewards of creation and to participate in the blossoming of the new creation. Clavier engages with Scripture and people such as Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Julian of Norwich, Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert, C. S. Lewis, and Rowan Williams to portray the whole ministry of God's people as being animated by the generosity, freedom, delight, and love of God. Order here.
“He has an infectious enthusiasm and confidence in the gospel, and a profound love of the Church as Christ’s body.”
Rescuing the Church . . . examines how people are initiated into a consumer culture during childhood and thus drawn into pursuing a vocation as consumers by means of various quasi-sacramental rites and practices. The upshot of this is that the church today is composed primarily of men and women whose lives are situated more within a consumer culture than within a distinctively Christian one. In order for the church to free itself, the author believes it must reclaim a sacramental identity that is grounded in a narrative tradition and realized in real, local worshipping communities. Order here.
In this book, Mark Clavier provides an in-depth historical and theological study of the nature and role of delight in Augustine’s theology. He contends that Augustine drew primarily from Cicero’s rhetorical theory as mediated through later Neoplatonic commentators to develop a rhetorical theology that could explain how even those unenlightened by the liberal arts could discover God. Clavier argues that delight functions within Augustine’s theology as eloquence does within Cicero’s rhetorical theory, engaging people’s hearts in order to make them receptive to a wisdom they would otherwise neglect or resist. Augustine conceived of God as an orator who persuades people to turn away from death towards salvation by pouring delight into their hearts through the reception of the Holy Spirit, presented as God’s own delight. His close identification of delight with the Holy Spirit laid the ground for the affective turn in western medieval theology and its understanding of contemplative reading as a participative process of ascent to God. Order here.