Author: John Pavlovitz

Photo by Gage Skidmore and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. History is a good teacher. If we pay attention to her, she reminds us that populations don’t become monstrous overnight, that nations don’t abandon humanity in a single moment, that generational human rights atrocities don’t form in an instant or in a vacuum. Corporate sickness is never sudden. There is always a slow, deliberate, almost imperceptible pattern: The metamorphosis of a people, begins with an opportunistic leader who understands the power of weaponized fear, who feeds them a steady diet of...

I’ve been a pastor for twenty-five years and a Christian for most of my life, and I don’t think prayer works anymore — at least not in the way we people of faith often like to believe it does or claim that it does or how I used to teach that it does. When someone we know or love or read about is gravely ill, we default to asking people to pray for their healing; more specifically, we ask others to ask God to heal them. We enlist people to take our cause (this sick person) to the Almighty....

It’s a real shame that migrants aren’t handguns. If migrants were handguns, this President would treat them with kid gloves. He’d be ever so careful with his words so as not to cause offense. He’d exercise the rarest of restraint to avoid angering those who love them; couching his words in every moment, being the closest thing to decent that he ever is. He would suddenly find compassion for them. If migrants were handguns, Republican politicians would passionately protect them. They’d go to bat for them and plead for them and legislate every possible way to make their existence...

“If you don’t like this country, then leave” is the tired refrain sung by supporters of this President.

Once again we find ourselves here in this terribly familiar place. We are grieving again. We are watching in disbelief again. Dozens of families are planning funerals again. On Saturday, August 3, as the death toll climbed we heard the graphic details, watched the unfathomable video, saw the media frenzy, and the deja vu of it all was stomach-turning. The questions come once more: “Why the hell are we doing this again? Are we ever going to fix this? How much death do people need to care?” It is as if we are watching the replay of a horror...

If the migrants were white, things would be very different right now in America. We would never have heard anything about building a wall during the 2016 Presidential campaign. It would not have become a Republican rally chant, a Conservative hashtag staple, a MAGA t-shirt favorite, a Donald Trump fixation. Republicans would not be forever declaring a “national emergency” at our southern border. There would be no talk of the lawless streams of bad people currently “overrunning” us. Republican politicians would not be continually working to create connections between exhausted, desperate families — and drug dealers, rapists, and gun...