Public Theologian, Belfast
Jonny Clark is the program manager for Public Theology at Corrymeela, sometimes called Ireland’s oldest peace center.
Born in New Zealand and married to an American, Jonny has lived in Northern Ireland for 40 years. When he was growing up, his family moved to Belfast at the heights of The Troubles. As he says, “During a time when most people were not moving to Northern Ireland.”
He has spent time in South Africa, Israel – Palestine, and other places of tension, learning ways that other countries have moved through or continue to struggle with conflict.
Jonny was involved with making a documentary called Guardians of the Flame, a film that strives to hear redemptive stories from people in the midst of religious and sectarian violence.
Public Theologian, Belfast
“Our conflict here in Northern Ireland is an ethno-religious conflict. People really weren’t throwing stones or shooting bullets around church doctrine, but religion was used to weaponize differences between us.”
On the walls that separate us:
“A big project I was involved in seven years ago was creating a documentary called Guardians of the Flame that was inspired by my life’s work, which is about what it would be like for people of faith, particularly Christian faith, to see a central part of their calling as peace-building and reconciliation. If loving your neighbor is the ultimate commandment for ourselves, and if our neighbor is often a Samaritan or the enemy, then probably a central part of being a person of faith is to look for those who are othered and outside and potentially even enemies and to love them.
“When I made Guardians of the Flame, it came from a book by the former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. He wrote a book called The Dignity of Difference, and he said after the Enlightenment, people thought religion was going to die out, but they were wrong because religion is fire. And like fire, it warms, but it also burns.
“And so my passion, I suppose, at that time was really imagining what would it look like to record stories of people who have lived in places where religion has been a big part of the narrative of the conflict, and to hear these redemptive stories of people whose faith or even just their life has transcended kind of religious boxes.
“You can look at our conflict in many ways. As a tribal conflict, as a post-colonial conflict of an English involvement here for 900 years, and you can look at it as land theft and oppression. You can look at it in lots of ways, but ultimately there are nearly two million people living in the north of Ireland — this kind of six counties that was created in 1921, a political state called Northern Ireland — and we are historically divided. Still to this day, 27 years after our peace agreement, we still live in many ways in a divided society.
“I think it’s about seven percent of young people go to integrated schools, and the rest of the population, the majority of schools are majority Catholic, Nationalist, Republican, or the majority are Protestant, Unionist, or Loyalist.
“So you end up in a different school, you often end up living in an area that’s dominated by your own kind of people that are like you, and so our society is still quite divided. You guys were with me today as I took a group around our peace walls, which are these very graphic big walls that separate — 40 feet tall — that have got bigger since our peace agreement, which in many ways shows you the fact that we have a form of peace, but it has not transformed our society completely.
“We’re still living with the after-effects. I quoted someone this morning when I was with the group, American writer Arlie Hochschild, who spent time in Louisiana researching division in America. She uses this phrase, empathy walls, and I think in our society we have physical walls that separate certain communities, but we also have empathy walls. Those empathy walls are not just between British and Irish people or Protestant-Catholic, our division is also socio-economic. We have middle-class well-off people living in suburban Belfast who can’t imagine the life of people living in housing estates in West Belfast and North Belfast and other parts of the city.
“We are separated in so many ways by a gulf of misunderstanding and stereotypes, and those things just make our society worse. There’s still work to be done to build peace in a fully comprehensive way. Not just this absence of violence, but a peace where our society is thriving and the weakest and most marginalized have a way to celebrate themselves.”
On small human connections:
“Over the years I have seen people encounter each other. For many years I worked for an organization, we ran a residential centre right on the Irish border. There was this decade of anniversaries from Irish history from 1912 to 23, which were these hugely significant years in Irish history, where everything changed. Ultimately in 1921 Ireland was partitioned for the first time, the political state of Northern Ireland was created. In many ways it was created to be a Protestant state for Protestant people. Then there was a civil war among Irish Nationalists and Republicans who disagreed. It was a really tragic period. So anyway, between 2012 and 2023 there was this decade of centenaries, where every year was the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme with the Easter Rising, or the Ulster Covenant, or the Anglo-Irish War, or the partitioned civil war.
“All these big things happened, and we decided to do some kind of walk along the Irish border, because we began to understand that — a friend of mine used this term — that the Irish border was like a wound in Ireland. It was still infected. It was still causing a sickness in our society, and we imagined a walk along the border. A walk of standing in solidarity with the many people who’ve lived in divided communities around the world, around our society, and standing in solidarity with them, and kind of in some respect praying.
“Abraham Heschel, the amazing rabbi and writer, walked with Dr. King in Selma, Alabama in the Civil Rights Movement. And Abraham Heschel said that when we walked, we realized that we were praying with our feet. And so we were thinking, what would it be like to pray with our feet? To walk along this border, zigzag along, imagining this kind of wound, and hoping, praying, imagining it as not just the physical border, but the conflict that it represented. What would it be like to imagine it healed, to walk it, and to meet people, and to hear their stories, and to give them hope that there’s a different way.
“So we did that for 10 years. We walked 200 miles along the border and over the years a lot of people encountered each other. I can tell lots of stories, but two friends of mine — I mean, one was a guy whose grandfather had been killed by the IRA, he had kind of grown up with what we would call now transgenerational trauma, where the death of his grandfather long before he was born, it affected his own dad. And that affected his marriage, that affected how he was parented, and then affected him as a grandchild years later. And he grew up into this environment where he was seeing life through the lens of hurt, pain, and possibly even hatred of the other side.
“Every day he used to go to school, and his bus would drive past a mural dedicated to the Loughgall Martyrs, who were an IRA brigade who had actually killed his grandfather. So every day on the way to school he sees a mural glorifying people that killed his grandfather. So whatever you think, whatever side you’re on, I think we should acknowledge that that would be hurtful for him in some way. He would experience the pain of that. And years later he ends up on one of these walks with us. And he’s walking alongside a guy who ended up coming from a Nationalist background, and the two of them started talking. And they both began to express to each other grief over what had happened, but also remorse over what communities had done to each other’s family. And they both ended up saying the words, “I’m sorry for what my people did to yours.”
“It was not choreographed. It wasn’t at the front of a room. It wasn’t this kind of special moment. There wasn’t a soundtrack. It was just two people walking along the road, on a pilgrimage if you like, and as they walked through life at three miles an hour, they began to encounter each other in a deep way, and saw the humanity in each other, and were able to express — somehow — they were sorry. And their lives were changed in those moments.
“I don’t think life is usually about instantaneous changes, but for those guys, when those words were uttered, something deeply miraculous did happen. Life was different, and that’s maybe what healing looks like. These small conversations that begin to unpack decades of hurt and transgenerational trauma.”
On dehumanizing others:
“If I could be a little bit personal, I have a family member, we live in different parts of the world, and we don’t see each other very much. And so, our trajectories have gone on different routes. I saw a family member last week that I hadn’t seen in quite a long time because we live a long, long way away from each other. And we have now become very different in how we view the world.
“We both call ourselves Christians, but we express our faith in a very different way. We are a living embodiment of the polarization that many societies live with. And so there’s quite a bit of tension in that.
“So when we came together, I think there was this unspoken rule that we’re not going to talk about politics. We’re not going to talk about whatever. Even religion, we start talking about faith — because we have the same faith, technically — but then we realize, gosh, we think about it very differently. And so, let’s not talk about that.
“Somebody said, really, the answer to the world is to not talk about politics and not talk about what divides them. And I think what I realized is that with this family member, we actually had a very special time and we really did encounter each other as people. And we loved each other. We just loved each other.
“And there was something liberating about not talking about whatever the latest talking point is, immigration, or whatever, or tariffs. We just talked about our families, we talked about our lives. And actually, there was something beautiful in that. Ultimately, the answer for us all in divided spaces is to understand the humanity in each other, or the Imago Dei in each other. The image of God in each other. Or just simply to realize that we’re all people. That a person is a person, no matter how small, to use the words of Dr. Seuss. We are people.
“And with this family member, I realized that we love each other and there’s something about that.
“Now I suppose that full reconciliation with me and this person would go way beyond that. It would go to where we can talk about politics, and we can talk about religion. But we weren’t ready for that. And so step one was seeing ourselves as humans. Maybe there’s a step two next week, and a step three, and maybe there’s a 50-step process. John Paul Lederach, one of his books is The Journey Toward Reconciliation. You know, reconciliation is a journey, it’s not a transactional moment that we do something. It’s a long journey.
“So maybe step one is seeing the humanity in each other. And if we can really just do that, you realize that person is not the politician they vote for. They’re not their theology of the end times, they are not this or that. That’s your brother, your sister, your cousin. So I wish we could see the humanity in each other. Often our algorithms and echo chambers are just driving us further and further apart. And we dehumanize each other. And at worst, we demonize each other. And that’s a very dangerous place to be.”
We joined Jonny as he led a tour of the Peace Walls in Belfast. Built during The Troubles to separate Protestant and Catholic communities in an effort to reduce violence, the walls were meant to come down after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. Today, more than 20 miles of the barriers still remain, many covered with political messaging.
To read the introduction to this series, follow this link.
The Troubles: Finding a Path Toward Healing in Northern Ireland
To listen to our podcast, follow this link or find us on the platform of your choice.
A Peace of My Mind on Buzzsprout
Credits:
Interview and photos: John Noltner
Field production: summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
Audio engineering: Razik Saifullah
Sincere but partial. The focus on empathy and personal encounter depoliticises the NI conflict by flattening colonialism, state power and institutional discrimination into shared trauma and misunderstanding. Framed as an evangelical Christian narrative rather than rigorous theological/political analysis, reduces reconciliation to an interpersonal process. Humanisation matters but without truth, accountability and structural change empathy alone cannot explain or repair what happened here. It also reflects a perspective shaped by privilege where reconciliation can be imagined without sustained engagement with structural power or accountability. Is this Corrymeela’s theological perspective?
Amen to that. One Earth, One Humanity, One Spirit.