The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

For a brief moment a year ago, watching Donald Trump and Elon Musk in a petty, posturing social media catfight was amusing; a welcome bit of schadenfreude seeing the unholy marriage of two of the most reprehensible human beings on the planet go south so spectacularly, so quickly. For a timeline so bereft of good news, their squabbling briefly lifted our emotional sails and took our minds away from...

Dear Jesus, We regret to inform you that your services are no longer required. As will happen, changes have occurred in recent months that have now rendered many of your past duties obsolete: Empathy is no longer necessary, with loving your neighbor as yourself deemed a rather wasteful use of current resources and manpower. Turning the other cheek has proven not to be measurably profitable, and we...

Recently, I was in a local church here in my home state of North Carolina discussing the impact of the Trump Administration on vulnerable populations. One director of a local ministry that has previously offered coastal town residents shelter during hurricanes and other dangerous weather events shared that many immigrants in her community are expressing a reluctance to take advantage of such servi...

So much suffering. So much death. So much sorrow. So much waste. We're not built for this. The days we find ourselves in are emotionally unsustainable. Our bodies and minds aren't equipped for this kind of protracted pain, this prolonged period of elevated urgency, this perpetual cumulative loss. That’s not how grief is supposed to work. Normally, we grieve over a moment. When someone we love dies...

To all those who imagine themselves to be friends, allies, and advocates of the LGBTQ community, As we enter PRIDE month, I think it’s important to say something to all of you, from someone who also aspires to be a support to queer human beings. This is not the PRIDE you have experienced in the past. There’s no way it can be. This is more than parades, rainbow flags, and memes. This is bigger than...

Lately, I’ve been reading and hearing a great deal about a supposed “Male Loneliness Epidemic in America.” My social media feed is filled with news stories, think pieces, and video commentaries lamenting the apparent pervasive sense of isolation young men here are afflicted with; the absence of deep friendships with other men and meaningful connections with women, and the higher rates of self-harm...

Pro-Life Christians adore embryos. They passionately preach about the sanctity of the life they say they are imprinted with, about their priceless intrinsic worth, about the unforgivable sin of those who would disrespect or disregard them. They speak effusively about embryos in conversation, publicly revere them, shed crocodile tears over them, accost strangers entering clinics over them, viciousl...

As a child raised in the Catholic Church, I was brought up believing that hell was real, though as I got older, I began to grow skeptical. The idea seemed incompatible with a God who was love, and so I gradually discarded it. These days, although I’m pretty sure hell doesn’t exist, I’m beginning to hope I’m wrong. Watching Republican Christians attempting to steamroll their ‘Big, Beautiful Bill” t...

As the song goes, “Summer’s here and the time is right for dancin’ in the street.” Protesting in the street? Maybe. Collapsing from exhaustion in the street? Sure. But, dancing? Not so much. The calendar and I are in a bit of a stalemate lately. She keeps telling me that fun is supposed to be on the agenda now, and I’m consistently ghosting her and hoping she’ll get the message and leave me be. My...

With the arrival of my 56th birthday later this week, here are 56 things I think I believe… 1. The single thing within your control in this life is how you choose to show up in the world.2. The people who most loudly advertise their love of the Bible and the Constitution have usually never read either.3. Stop imagining people are sitting around thinking critically about you. They’re more concerned...

In my travels around this country, both in person and online, I meet lots of white people who fancy themselves woke. They feel this way because they're now aware (perhaps for the first time) of the brutality of our Government, and just how infected with bigotry and supremacy it is. They're starting to become aware of the unearned privilege of their pigmentation; the countless advantages they've ha...

Picture someone you love who died serving this nation, or even someone you’ve never met. Imagine them wherever they took their final breath on this planet: jumping into churning, frozen foreign seas in a screaming storm of artillery fire; shivering in a filthy trench in the terrifying blackness of an insect-blanketed jungle floor; jumping from a fire-engulfed plane into a disorienting maelstrom of...

For a year and a half, we’ve all been watching the horrors that have unfolded in Israel and Gaza, and social media has been saturated with calls for people to declare unequivocally where they stand on the matter: Are you with the beautiful human beings slaughtered by Hamas, or are you with the radiant lives extinguished by the IDF? Are you against Islamophobia or are you against anti-Semitism? Do...

T his should have been easy. A decade ago, we endured the most corrupt, inept, and relentlessly predatory presidential administration in our nation’s history. We witnessed a willfully and tragically mismanaged public health crisis and a live-streamed, coordinated insurrection designed to overturn an election and install a despot. We watched an extremist minority commandeer the highest court in our...

This President has been many things since descending an escalator a decade ago: a national embarrassment, a global punchline, an environmental disaster, a divider of people, a prolific murderer of the English language. But he's also been a floodlight. He's fully exposed millions of people who'd kept themselves carefully concealed, many of whom I thought I knew. I can see them now in ways I never c...

There are moments when you’re reminded just how far people around you have drifted from the plot of humanity, when you realize how poisoned by politics your family members, friends, and neighbors have become; the capacity for cruelty of those you share a country with. As President Biden and his family revealed the grim details of his Stage 4 metastasizing prostate cancer diagnosis, they came flood...

There is not enough. That is the most pervasive distortion of reality perpetuated by Conservative Christians in America right now. We see it reiterated in every GOP position and policy, from immigration to healthcare to education to social services. The entire Republican ethos is built around the lie of lack, a myth of scarcity that keeps the rank-and-file pew sitters in a perpetual state of irrat...

The artists will lead us. This week, Bruce Springsteen took the stage in Manchester, England to begin his European tour, standing alone, silhouetted in white spotlights. And as he has done thousands of times over the past half-century and change, he delivered the sermon of a denim-clad prophet of moral clarity: The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of mu...

To My Loved Ones, I'm writing to let you know that I'm aware of what you think of me, either because you've told me during combustible room-clearing conversations, over terse cold war text exchanges, or in second-hand words passed through the people who now serve as the sole messengers between us. You believe I've changed. You think I've become radicalized by the Left, that I'm a woke bleeding-hea...

I am a person of profound privilege. As a white, cisgender-heterosexual man born in America and raised in the Christian faith, I have been afforded every benefit this nation offers: education, opportunity, freedom, options (the kind most will never experience), while having very little required from me other than to show up. I have never known marginalization of any kind, never been oppressed by a...

The volume of the monsters is unavoidable right now. Their vitriol is everywhere: pouring into comment sections, flooding school board meetings, arriving unannounced in neighborhood gatherings, and littering the White House social media feed. The bigots are feeling emboldened, the racists have been empowered—and the noise they are making is the stuff of nightmares for the millions here whose peace...

Mother's Day. For many people, that means flowers and handmade cards and Sunday brunches and waves of laughter. It means celebration and gratitude and warm embraces and great rejoicing. It means resting fully in loving and being loved. But not for some people. For some, it only means tears. For some, it just hurts. In the hearts of many, this day is a bitter, unsolicited reminder of what was but n...

Mother's Day should not be compulsory for any woman. It should be the yearly celebration of a decision, a moment to mark with gratitude a beautiful but perilous journey one has carefully or prayerfully chosen to traverse. It should be an anniversary of choice. Mother’s Day should not be an annual reminder of a destiny decided by strangers who will never know their names nor care about their storie...

Today, as Mother’s Day Weekend began, I watched the sickening video of a hysterical 16-year-old girl with her face smashed into the pavement by police officers, as I.C.E. agents hauled away her mother and newborn baby in Worcester, Massachusetts. A crowd of rightly horrified and outraged neighbors poured into the street, appealing to a compassion and decency that was nowhere to be found. This teen...

The Catholic Church chose Robert Prevost as its new pope in the wake of the recent passing of Pope Francis. And let’s just say, there was no joy in MAGAville at the news. In a matter of minutes after the selection was announced, Prevost, who has taken the title Pope Leo XIV, was being virtually crucified by Trump surrogates, Right-wing pundits, Fox News hosts, and rank-and-file America First culti...