The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

After three weeks of incessant media fixation and social media handwringing, President Biden announced that he is dropping out of the 2024 presidential campaign. The beautiful irony of this act, is that by removing himself from contention for the November election, Biden reminds us once again why he was and is so deserving of leading America, and why he is the human being and leader that Donald Tr...

Guilt is a powerful drug. Once it has its hooks in you, once it enters your bloodstream, it can impossible to get yourself free. For twenty-five years I was a pastor in the local church, and I know how insidious and pervasive guilt-addiction is in American Christianity. I've seen the way the Church has gladly been the dirty dealer. There is a seductive power that comes when you can wield shame ove...

"I think I'm losing my mind." If I had a dime for every time I've heard that over the course of the past eight years as I've traveled this country or perused my inbox, I'd be writing this from my expansive villa in Tuscany while U2 performs in the courtyard. Slingshotting around America and talking to a disparate swath of its people in progressive churches, women's groups, humanist conferences, ac...

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 read and studied and preached the Scriptures extensively, led community Bible studies and stude...

These are moments when absolute clarity matters, and this is one of unthinkable consequence so let’s not b******t one another here, America: the attempted assassination of Donald Trump reminds us why he cannot be the president again. If a deranged registered Democrat had tried to kill Joe Biden with an AR-15, not only would the Right not decry the violence but they would have celebrated it (as the...

I used to think I loved America. I used to fully believe the mythology of my youth. Growing up, I bought into its songs and its anthems and its stirring fiction of liberty and opportunity, which I guess was understandable. For a suburban, cisgender, heterosexual male who identified as Christian, they were as true for me as for anyone. They were all I'd ever known. That version of America had alway...

In the wake of the first presidential debate, we here in America have been immersed in a single national news narrative: Joe Biden: the successful sitting president who defeated Donald Trump just four years ago, who led us past an insurrection, through COVID, and out of inflation—needs to step aside. This incessant narrative has been expectedly fueled by a myopic media fully intoxicated by the hit...

America has always been the place people could nurture hopes that found welcome nowhere else; the adoptive home for dreamers from every square inch of the planet who came as refugees from the legion of nightmares of this life. We have been the door of radical hospitality (at least in theory), opened wide to a disparate world fleeing the cruelty of their geography and circumstance, those living in...

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." — Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride A quick little Bible history lesson: The first Christians didn't call themselves Christians. It wasn't some congratulatory self-identifier as it is today: a way of loudly trumpeting one's own supposed goodness; something easily slapped on social media bios, bumper stickers, and t-shirts...

Dear Young Voters, “All Gen Zers are lazy, uneducated, and they don’t care about anyone but themselves.” No, I don’t believe this is true at all, but I bet you’ve heard that before from older people and I bet it pisses you off. It should. No one deserves to be stereotyped and made into a caricature. Every single person is completely unique and it’s dehumanizing to lump people into boxes just becau...

Some days the fight overwhelms all of us. It is exhausting work to push back against injustice when there seems to be such an abundance of it.  Here are a few reasons why the fight is still worth it. Choose one, or five, or all fifty and remember why you do what you do… 1) Because your children and grandchildren deserve a beautiful life.2) Because of the Transgender teen who shouldn't have to wait...

Eight years into one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history, actual followers of Jesus need to testify loudly to something: the white Evangelical Church in America has failed us all—fully, grievously, irreparably. If not for them, Donald Trump’s vile Access Hollywood video confession of assault is a deal breaker. If not for them, his ridiculing of a disabled reporter is a bridge too far....

Freedom is a really nice illusion. The idea of individual autonomy is one fought for every single day in my country, and I suspect in yours as well. It’s the public battleground where so much blood is shed and so many hills are taken, only to be lost again. And yet beneath every moment of necessary struggle and every well-earned bit of progress toward personal liberty, there is a greater war to be...

With fear for our democracy, I dissent. - Justice Sotomayer We dissent. We The (Righteously Pissed-Off) People: those of us who make our simple homes here, who build and love and create in relative anonymity; those who daily labor in the unadorned ordinary of lives that by themselves, feel rather inconsequential. We dissent today. We who still remember what the audacious experiment called America...

Susan Walsh / AP file So, what is actually happening here? In the wake of the first presidential debate, I’ve watched members of the media, high profile talking heads, and millions of voters frantically pushing the panic button, calling for Joe Biden to step down and encouraging sky-is-falling histrionics. Now, I expect this from a cultic Republican Party prostrate before a traitorous sociopath an...

The woman's voice began to quiver. She'd just introduced herself to me in the hallway of our church, and for a couple of minutes she'd held it together. But as she started to share the difficulty of the past few months, the strain showed on her face and her cheerful facade quickly began to crumble and fall away before my eyes—until finally she blurted out the words punctuated by heavy sobs: "I don...

Dear Friend, There's a good chance you won't see this, as at some point over the past few years you either unfriended, unfollowed, or physically disconnected from me—or I from you. There may have been a decisive severing or a slow drifting apart, but the resulting space between us is the same. Still, I'm hopeful that somehow these words will reach you, because there are some things that you need t...

In the wake of the shameful growing legacy of mass shootings in America, one of the saddest realizations, is that the loudest, most vehement voices championing the cause of weapons of brutality—have come from professed Evangelical Christians. The cognitive dissonance of supposed followers of Jesus choosing the side of violence and opposing the movement of mercy is staggering, exceeded only by the...

Since I was a small child raised in the Christian faith I've recited The Apostles' Creed  in church. For those of you who may be unfamiliar, the Creed is essentially a synopsis of the essential doctrinal tenets of the Christian faith, intended to be professed in corporate worship as a shared declaration of belief. It's world-altering  big picture stuff touching on the reality and nature of God, th...

Few people are less Christlike than professed Christians when they're attacking the LGBTQ community. There is a malice and sadism they're capable of that simply defies explanation and fully denies the heart of Jesus. Incredibly, these folks are somehow able to simultaneously claim faith in Christ, while responding with a cruelty, viciousness, and violence that he never once demonstrated, continual...

Can we talk for a few minutes, Trump supporters? We need to clear the air if we can. I imagine you probably feel like we're the enemy right about now—those of us who are loudly resisting the former president—that this is personal between us. Well it is and it isn't.  Honestly yes, we're still scratching our heads at the fact that you voted for him to begin with, but ultimately we have to trust tha...

In recent years it's been fairly common to hear white, cisgender-heterosexual Christian men feigning incredulity at people looking for "safe spaces" (Their air quotes, not mine.) The request by historically marginalized communities to have a place where they are not subjected to open bigotry or hateful speech, is often met with thick condescension, various sarcastic insults, and the assertion that...

As children, most of us remember being on many of those seemingly endless road trips, in the back seat of a car or maybe from the less desirable third row of minivan seats (or if you were part of a really big family, way back in the 1900s: from the rear-facing, unsecured crawl space in the bowels of a brown paneled station wagon). Frustrated and impatient, we all found ourselves shouting the refra...

Every time I hear a white person tell me that they "don't see color", I know that they're likely either lying or kidding themselves.  I try very hard to see color every day—and gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and every other distinction of the people who cross my path, because those things are important. I need to see theses things so that I can truly see all people, so that my understandin...

There's a common assertion about those of us who occupy some space in the political or religious Left by our critics across the aisle or the pew: We don't love America like they do . The contention is that we have less respect for our Government, our troops, our national security than they have; that our religious convictions are less sincere and our spiritual journeys less valid. Everything of ou...