Author: John Pavlovitz

America has a white male problem. If you’re living here and you’re not a white male, I likely don’t have to do much to convince you of that fact. You’ve been an eyewitness. You’ve had a front row seat to the horrors. You’ve likely been on the receiving end of the misogyny, carried the brunt of the bigotry, and sustained the bruises of the brutality. We’ve all seen the mass shootings, read the assault statistics, and inventoried the hate crimes and they speak for themselves. The pattern is undeniable, the repetition is clear. We know that the violence of...

Words are stunningly versatile things. They have the ability to either create or to destroy, to lift us or level us, to give us wings or to crush us beneath their weight, to inspire us to reach the loftiness parts of our nature or to drive us to the depths of our blackest darkness. We know this to be true from the way other’s voices have shaped us in both redemptive and debilitating ways. The words of others can become for us the language for all that we harbor unspoken in our hearts: every unfulfilled longing, each unhealed wound,...

They would not help people. Not one of them. They all voted no on giving aid to Americans during the single greatest health crisis of our lifetimes: one that has taken the lives of over a half a million Americans and left millions more at the precipice of poverty and homelessness — or well beyond it. They chose not to bring comfort or rest or peace to the assailed, harassed, and helpless in front of them. Not the Atheists, not the Muslims, not the humanists; not the Buddhists, Jews, Sikhs, or Wiccans or Humanists. The Christians did this. The...

WARNING: The following contains spoilers and/or possible spoilers for Marvel’s WandaVision on Disney+ I get Wanda Maximoff. At least, I get what I think I know about her. I get what grief does to your world. In the seconds after my father died suddenly and many times in the nearly seven years since, I’ve had a similar thought: I’d do anything to change this. Literally anything. The moment I took the phone call from my youngest brother and heard in his voice a quiver it’s never had before as he told me the news of my father’s death, I...

Human beings are supposed to have a bottom: a base level of decency that defines us, a place we will not go to because to go there would mean abandoning the very moral givens that tether us to one another — and slipping into inhumanity. We are expected as participants in community to have some ethical boundaries that hedge us in and prevent the very worst of our tendencies from festering to the point they grow toxic and metastasize within us and among us. We live in this world every day alongside countless people in our work and our...