Clayton Goodgame is an anthropologist of religion, kinship, and the Middle East. His current research is on the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, a church composed of a Palestinian laity and a Greek monastic hierarchy. It focuses on the religious lives of Palestinian and Greek Orthodox Christians and how they inform wider social and political dynamics in Jerusalem. In particular, Clayton is interested in processes of transmitting Orthodoxy, be it in time, for example through generations of Palestinian families, or in space, through sacred substances like olive oil, spring water, or stone. His current book project, The Orthodox Line, is an ethnographic and historical examination of these processes and how they inform idioms of sacred descent which feature prominently in the political discourse of the church, as well as the wider politics of Palestine/Israel. 

Clayton received his PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics (2021) and recently finished a postdoctoral project on the politics of church property in the Middle East, funded by UK Economic and Social Research Council.