The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

Right now, you and I are being perpetually bombarded with an onslaught of soul-crushing news, Constitutional crises, and human rights atrocities. It is beyond what we can carry. One of the byproducts of this sustained urgency is that we can find ourselves so pulled in a million directions that we are unable to be lucid and effective. I’ve found one of the most helpful questions in these and other...

While it was heartening to see millions of Americans take to the streets in hundreds of rallies throughout this country, as part of the #HandsOff campaign, it was also a reminder of how easily we could have prevented this fascist regime and how difficult it will be to overcome it. As I saw the video and photo updates roll in, I admit that the cynic in me wondered if all these people had shown up t...

I’ve shed many misplaced tears recently. For a while I thought I was grieving over the loss of America; that I was missing something we used to be, a place we once were, a new national erosion of hope I thought I'd been witnessing. I imagined this great attrition was the source of my recent despair, mistakenly believing I was lamenting something that had at one time been here but was now gone. It...

Dear Donald, We are Americans and we are fearful of what you are doing to our nation. That is to say, we fear your ignorance, your recklessness, and your incompetence because they place this country in such great peril. We fear your disregard for our Constitution, your contempt for our Rule of Law, and your lack of anything resembling a working moral compass as you repeatedly bulldoze the two-hund...

Today is a day of mourning for tens of millions of Americans. You can see the bereaved everywhere you look. They may not be dressed in black or sitting in a church pew or tearfully standing graveside or in the back of slow-moving cars with headlights flashing—but they are deeply grieving nonetheless. They are people who have lost someone they dearly love, though not to death but to something else,...

War is indeed hell. The Conservative Republican movement in America is a case study of 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 becomes unable to manufacture...

Today, a Trump supporter called me a "beta male." I was on social media, expressing my respect for survivors of sexual assault and women who've been subjected to the mansplaining of their trauma—and he dropped (based on his commentary following) what he thought was some leg sweep, knockout punch, designed to leave me in a quivering mass on the floor. Apparently, I was supposed to be insulted, emot...

Conservatives love embryos. They tell us all the time. They speak effusively about them in conversation, publicly revere them at rallies, shed crocodile tears over them in Op-Eds, accost strangers entering clinics over them, viciously troll people on social media because of them, and sermonize on street corners about them. They even claim to have voted for a reprehensible monster who they'd never...

William Shakespeare said that all the world is a stage, and he was onto something. When a beloved public figure leaves this life by their own hands, millions of people invariably express the shock of seeing a human being so outwardly radiant and clearly successful and universally loved succumbing to such internal sadness. They find it almost beyond comprehension. Those of us who live with chronic...

Ok, so I get it—you’re not an activist. Or, at least maybe that’s the way you’ve always felt. Perhaps you don’t see yourself in a street with a sign yelling slogans, shouting through a bullhorn on courthouse steps, wielding your social media profile like an independent news outlet, or standing at a school board meeting, elevating your voice to rise above the jeers of your hateful neighbors. These...

More often than I like to admit, some recurring dark thoughts creep in and level me these days. They may arrive as I foolishly wade into a comment section in an article about illegal ICE raids. They might show up upon hearing a neighbor’s off-the-cuff remark regarding Ukraine. They sometimes arrive after eavesdropping at a local coffee shop near a Southern Baptist seminary. Or, they may come seemi...

"You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. - Jesus Dear Jesus,Today I realized something about me that makes me a bit sick to my stomach, something I’m embarrassed to admit: I may not be all that interested in loving my enemies after all. It su...

"I feel like I'm losing my mind." These words are a continual presence here these days. I hear them a couple hundred times a day it seems, in one form or another. I read them in desperate social media outbursts. I find them in my inbox from friends and strangers. I hear them in my head. They are the symptoms of a shared sickness we now find ourselves afflicted with: a sprawling homegrown mental he...

So, he accidentally texted war plans to a journalist on a social media app. The Secretary of Defense. Of America. The second in the chain of command behind the President. The person responsible for defense policy, spending, and operations, including the military and its personnel. T hat guy recklessly and inadvertently divulged the most sensitive military information to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atl...

There's nothing more dangerous or terrifying than professed Christians who have no real interest in Jesus. They're rather easy to spot if you're paying attention. They're usually the ones most loudly claiming religious liberty while methodically swallowing up the personal freedoms and elemental rights of other people. They incessantly broadcast their devotion to God on their bumpers, bellies, and...

I am a collector of stories. I watch people, I listen closely to them, and I eavesdrop on their conversations in person and on social media. I look for patterns and try to understand what's happening to us as a nation. I've tried to put my finger on how I'm feeling lately, how I think so many of us are feeling out there. It isn't outrage. We've been there for a while now if we've been paying atten...

I'd just finished a speaking event with some progressive writers and activists and we were meeting with people who'd stayed after to say hello, have a book signed, or share some thoughts about the evening. After saying goodbye to the man I'd been talking to, I lifted my head and my eyes locked with a middle-aged woman who'd been standing behind him. Her wide smile dissolved almost immediately, and...

Hey, MAGA Christians, I have a spiritual question and was wondering if you could help me out. I used to think I was a Christian. I was raised in a Christian home and went to a Christian school. After a few meandering spiritual wilderness years, I attended a Christian seminary, became a Christian pastor, and have served in Christian churches for most of the past twenty-five years of my life. I've r...

(Extreme Satire Warning) Hey Everyone, Enough’s enough here, OK? This has all gone too far. We all need to be nicer to Elon. Last night, I watched the wealthiest man in the world on Fox News, pouring his heretofore undiscovered heart out while lamenting the loss of a few of his scorched, overpriced metal children. I felt so profoundly sad for him. “I always thought that Democrats were supposed to...

I am a semi-retired optimist. I used to believe that things would always be okay: that no matter how bad circumstances seemed in the world, I trusted that people would eventually do the right thing, that goodness would prevail, that the rational center would hold. I used to believe that our system of checks and balances would protect us from overreaching parties and mentally unstable presidents an...

"We should do a brain scan just to rule out some things..." the emergency room doctor said to me matter-of-factly. Before I could ask him, he responded to the question that immediately formed inside my already throbbing head: "…things like aneurysms or tumors." A few minutes later I was sitting on a roll of white, onionskin examining table paper, beneath the raking fluorescent light of an antisept...

Dear God, I’m not sure where to start here. Originally, I was going to try easing into this with some small talk, but then I realized with You being God n' all, well… that's probably not the best idea. So, I'm just going to come right out and ask it: exactly what the hell is going on here? I mean, I don't know if You've been watching lately or not, but things have gone completely sideways down her...

This week, Robert Morris, the founding pastor of Texas’ Gateway megachurch was indicted for lewd acts with a child. Roberts has served as a Trump spiritual advisor and been close to his campaigns and presidencies, with his church a longtime visible and vocal political advocate of the Republicans’ alleged “family values” platform. And what’s so vile and infuriating about this most recent revelation...

To those who voted for Donald Trump, We on the Left were right. We were right last year when we warned you that Project 2025 was the impending Republican Party agenda—that its explicitly outlined plans for theocracy would inevitably become their platform and that this would negatively impact all of us, Christian and non-Christian alike. We were right in the Fall when we sounded the alarms about El...

A couple of years ago my family and I walked into an older relative's house unannounced. They'd been expecting us that day from out-of-town, but we'd arrived thirty minutes earlier than we'd planned so we knocked lightly and walked in. The small TV on the kitchen counter was playing FoxNews. When he came down the stairs, almost in the middle of greeting us our relative walked hurriedly over to the...