The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

I love this country. I don't love it blindly, though. I don't love it unconditionally. I don't love it unreservedly. I love it with my eyes wide open, my mind fully lucid, my senses completely awake. I see well its every disfigurement and blemish, every grotesque part of its past and every ugly bit of its present. I see the crucible of colonialism it was formed in, the genocide and white supremacy...

I feel really sorry for Conservative Christians. It must be awful to go through life terrified: to believe that you are perpetually in danger; to always be threatened by encroaching predators lurking in the shadows, around corners, beneath the bed, in the bathroom, at the border. What a draining experience it has to be walking through every day looking over your shoulder, certain that attack is in...

Yesterday I came across a video on a widely-followed Instagram page. It was a small section of a full Joe Rogan interview with author Coleman Hughes. In the clip, Hughes was accurately explaining to Rogan, the Hamas tactic of fully embedding itself within civilian communities, thereby making it nearly impossible for the IDF to distinguish between members of the terrorist group and innocent Gazans....

I'm really tired. Marrow-deep, hope-sucking, soul-choking exhausted. There are all sorts of reasons for this: a seeming endless state of national urgency, a fierce and unrelenting tribalism, the evaporating of basic compassion for other people. I'm tired of the relentless attacks on voting rights of people of color, of sustained assaults on the rights of women to have autonomy over their own bodie...

Are you exhausted right now? Be grateful. That is a good thing. You see, that weariness is confirmation that your heart is working properly. It is your humanity responding to so much inhumanity around you. It is evidence of your goodness still fighting to feel useful, to push back against a steady and furious stream of ugliness. Your heavy fatigue in this moment is the internal alarm that will not...

Donald Trump was president for 1,460 days. If asked by someone in the future to summarize in a small space, the depth and breadth of the collective injury we've sustained as a people and a nation, the word I keep coming back to is waste . Those 1,460 days were simply a terrible, unforgivable, unthinkable waste. A waste of time: the countless hours so many people from every walk of life had to spen...

We don’t have to speculate on the sociopathy of MAGA Conservatives. They have put it all in writing. PROJECT 2025 outlines in precise and sickening detail, the Republican Evangelical plan to swiftly thrust America into full-on theocracy and dismantle every legislative protection and democratic process put in place to prevent the marriage of Church and State. Project 2025 seeks to immediately estab...

There's nothing more dangerous 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 things like 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 and bellies and...

Growing up in the Catholic Church, as a child I learned about the Resurrection story in the New Testament: Jesus dies and three days later he rises from the tomb. I read the stories of Jesus calling Lazarus out of the grave after four days there, and of him reviving a dead child carried to him by her panic-stricken father. Back then I believed these stories as actual events. I accepted that physic...

We parents have stories we like to tell our children: Cheaters never prosper. Honesty is the best policy. Crime doesn’t pay. Good prevails. Love wins. Sometimes we speak these words as steady declaration of what we believe to be true. Other times they are spoken as the hopeful aspirations of what we wish were true but are no longer certain of. Still other times, they feel like willful fictions we...

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Christian, you are a mystery to me. I see you there on that rally platform, I watch you in the crowd and the words fail me. I watch you standing there with wide-eyed, breathless adoration and I simply can't fathom how you ended up there in that very spot; what it is you're feeling in that moment, how this has become a voice you feel such affinity with. Why are you here? Why are you still with him?...

Hey Beautiful Mess Community! To celebrate us reaching 10,000 subscribers today, here’s an exclusive excerpt from my forthcoming book, Worth Fighting Fo r , arriving April 2nd. This is called ‘Warning Lights.’ Enjoy! John How long has this light been on? I asked my teenage son, after tossing down the keys to the car I once owned but have since gradually been evicted from.  “I’m not sure,” he matte...

Today is a day of mourning for 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—but they are deeply grieving nonetheless. They are people who have lost someone they dearly love, though not to death but to something else; something much less expected, something much more unnatural. They h...

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

This week, a dear friend of mine who makes a living publishing original content on social media and who has a large, vibrant following, messaged me to catch up on life and work. She shared her sadness at needing to make the difficult decision to pursue a realtor’s license, despite an outwardly thriving niche platform that takes up well over forty hours of her week and reaches tens of thousands of...

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Jesus was a progressive.  He arrived two thousand years ago, not with vague religious nostalgia or territorial separatist dogma but with a bold, clear vision that pulled disparate people forward together in interdependent community. He started a revolutionary underground movement of people of the street, not a top-down theocracy of wealth and power and cloistered privilege. His sermons didn’t hark...

None of this makes sense. I think I’ve been misled somewhere. Growing up, I learned from the men and women around me what it meant to be a gentleman ; how decent, good-hearted, honorable young men lived in the world, the way they treated other human beings, how they carried and conducted themselves. And from as early as I can remember, I was taught that women deserved to be treated by such men of...

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

I am a person of profound privilege. As a white, cisgender, heterosexual Christian man raised in America, I have had nearly every benefit and buffer afforded human beings and this has made my path exponentially easier than those not carrying these qualifiers. Simply because of my pigmentation, gender, orientation, profession of faith, and physical appearance, I have been insulated from countless t...

I need you to clarify something for me, MAGA friend. I've seen all your incendiary social media posts about the border crossers. I've come across the fictional statistics about their supposed crime and alleged violence that you so willingly repost. I've read scores of rambling, alarmist diatribes from Republican politicians. I've seen the Conservative pundits daily vomit their sky-is-falling talk...

America has a white male problem. If you're living here and you're not a white male I probably 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 sexism, you’ve bore the brunt of the bigotry and sustained the bruises of the phobias. We've all seen the mass shootings, read the assa...

America, we will soon say goodbye to something. One way or another this year will end with a farewell. It will either close with a glorious, triumphant blast of freedom—or with the sickening death knell of a once-great nation, gone for good. Either America will part ways with the Republican candidate for president (and his sycophantic enablers and coconspirators) or we will part ways with democrac...

Sunday is coming. Soon, millions of Americans will find themselves in the houses of worship that dot nearly every corner of this country: disparate buildings where they'll gather under the banner of religion, of faith, of goodness. Whether set in trappings that are ancient or modern, filled with polished pews, reclaimed restaurant booths, or plush concert seating, a vast multitude will leave their...