Author: John Pavlovitz

What do you remember about the first days of the pandemic? I remember going to three grocery stores with a rising sense of dread as the shelves became more and more bare. I remember the disorienting uncertainty as our routines were interrupted and our normal imploded. I remember looking everywhere for bread and the bread was gone, so I learned to bake bread — and then could not find flour or yeast. I remember feeling like everything was shifting, that nothing felt stable. I also remember that I thought things were going to be different now. We know the...

He has been indicted again, this time for trying to override the voices and votes of the American people in order to steal an election and permanently install himself as a dictator. These are offenses of the presidency more traitorous and sobering than anything we’ve witnessed in our young nation’s turbulent lifetime. Sadly, that is not the story here. There were days when far less than these charges would have elicited repulsion from patriotic Americans. There were days such things would been dealbreakers. They are not anymore. That is the story. In any other iteration of America’s history, a...

Growing-up I lived with an image of Jesus. I am talking about a literal picture that inhabited our family room, my Catholic school hallways, and the homes of many of the Christians I knew. With angular features, blue eyes, and flowing golden hair this Jesus was calm, quietly confident — and decidedly White. And it was this depiction of Christ that quietly shaped my working theology and my understanding of the world in ways I am only now just beginning to understand and slowly learning to jettison. There is a subtle racism that so many White Christians are born...

Cue the lights. Strike up the band. It is showtime again in America. Every single day they brazenly parade around in front of us: in our neighborhoods, on our timelines, in our school board meetings, in stores in front of our children. They shamelessly don their cheap, glittery regalia, meticulously transforming themselves into a sickening inversion of who they actually are, putting on an unnatural false persona designed to indoctrinate young minds by passing as something they are not. It is a vile bait and switch that decent human beings should be sickened by. The political Right is the...

The Conservative Republican movement in America is a case study in what fear does when it fully grips a group of people; the emotional net result of being weaned for decades on a steady diet of culture war rhetoric, targeted disinformation, racial stereotypes, incendiary sermons, and plain ol’ white nationalism. In this environment, the human heart become unable to manufacture empathy for the other, as it finds encroaching enemies everywhere it looks. Someone in the grips of this kind of prolonged enmity can no longer seek the common good, because it doesn’t recognize how our fortunes are tethered together....

Dear Conservative Christians, I wanted to express my sincere regrets at how our recent exchanges have left you feeling. It seems I’ve offended you in some way and I want to apologize for that. I’m sorry you feel persecuted when I confront you, that you feel unfairly judged by my pointed words, or that it seems like I’m being purposefully cruel, as that isn’t my intention. It’s just that sometimes my faith gets the best of me and in my sincere desire to help people I can come off a bit abrasive or rude or intolerant. Come to think...