The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

A strange, uncomfortable question continues to hover in the periphery of my mind, but before I ask it, I need to make something clear right up front, so there can be no twisting of what I’m about to say (or at least so that twisting does not go unchallenged): I do not own a gun and detest guns. I abhor and condemn violence. I believe the Second Amendment has been intentionally perverted by Right-l...

Our town recently celebrated its second annual PRIDE Festival. It was, by all accounts, a joy-filled, loving celebration of our diverse community, marred only by the presence of a group of professed Christians who attended with the sole intention of making people feel unwelcome, unloved, and unsafe, and I wrote as much here. A couple of days later, I was in the grocery checkout line when a man beh...

The last decade in America has been an unrelenting funeral. For over ten years now, we’ve all stepped into the day knowing that we would be facing the death of people we love. However, it would not be their physical passing that we would bear witness to and mourn over, but the dying of the people we once believed them to be; it would be the grieving over the still-living. As a substantial segment...

“And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” - Christian hymn As a longtime progressive pastor, I’ve come to understand that there are few people as unloving as Conservative Evangelicals claiming to hate the sin but love the sinner. And yet, when the snarling ugliness is a few feet away from you, showing you just how unloving it intends to be, it’s always disorienting. Yesterday, for the seco...

Hey Donald, So, you’re going after ANTIFA. At least, that’s your latest noisy dog-and-pony show distraction designed to divert the attention of the American people from your withholding of the Epstein files, your dismantling of our Constitutional protections, your Gestapo-esque ICE brutality, and your illegal and immoral military takeover of American cities. Now, all reasonable human beings (which...

At first glance, it’s easy to focus on the Trump Administration’s attacks on historically marginalized minority communities: the incessant and increasingly violent war it is now raging on immigrants, on people with brown skin, on the queer community, on women, on Muslims, on people with disabilities. Understandably, our collective attention is drawn to those who are clearly vulnerable right now, t...

This week, I was thinking about a classroom in Central New York in the early 80s. I was sitting in the front row of a World History class, learning about Hitler’s ascension to power and the gruesome events it birthed. At the time, it had all only been fifty years in the rearview mirror of our shared story, but to me, it may as well have been an eternity away. We’d spent the previous weeks reading...

Well, Trump Supporters, as a member of the woke, radical Left, it kills me to say this, but you win. It’s not easy to admit you’ve been beaten, but there’s no hiding or denying it at this point. You’ve certainly owned the Libs this time… I mean, sure, food prices are through the roof, as are costs for healthcare and just about any goods or services you can name. And yes, our Military is being helm...

Sometimes you don’t have to work to figure out where the racists are. Sometimes they out themselves. Within nanoseconds of the NFL announcing that Latin rapper Bad Bunny would be performing the Super Bowl Halftime Show, the Trump cult tore itself away from Charlie Kirk martyrdom, MAGA church shooter retcons, restaurant logo crusades, and pro-ICE posturing to launch into a full-on frenzy of perform...

I am Charlie Kirk. The phrase has quickly become a catch-all display of performative Conservative virtue signaling, lobbed indiscriminately into social media comment sections, affixed to pickup truck flags, and emblazoned across t-shirts. I’ve invited people to help me understand what they mean by the now ubiquitous sentence whenever it shows up; precisely what statement they’re making, the specif...

Mornings are strange these days. The sedative haze of sleep slowly begins to lift, and my conscious mind starts taking inventory and assembling the data and reporting back its initial findings: I’m in bed… I’m awake… I’m alive… It’s Thursday… But most of the time, that’s about as far as I get when I am suddenly assaulted with another, far more sobering realization: I’m in America… … S**t. And, in...

I’d like to say I’m shocked. I’d like to say this is an aberration. I wish I could tell you that the Conservative Christian canonizing of Charlie Kirk was unexpected; that the hundreds of thousands of professed followers of Jesus pouring into churches, local parks, football stadiums, and social media to engage in performative histrionics are temporarily caught up in some cultic fervor that will so...

Reflection Questions Charlotte talks about the issue of loneliness being critical in understanding how many people have been pulled into Conservative Christian communities that are predatory toward them, because they find a sense of belonging, because the Right does a better job of making them feel seen. What are your reactions to that? Charlotte says that “those of us who are people of faith in p...

I'm sure you've heard someone ask to speak to the manager. As this week is coming to a close, I’ve been asking myself, “If I were the manager of the progressive Christian movement in America (which, of course, I am not and do not want to be), what instructions would I give it?” I've come up with five suggestions for progressive Christians collectively in America. You may agree with them, you may n...

Reflection Questions: Bishop Swan says that progressive Christianity has “failed to confront the concept of whiteness, of power, of empire, and it has not confronted them with the boldness of the prophets that we read about.” Do you agree with him? If so, why do you believe this is the case? Where do you see that confrontation happening? When you hear Bishop Swan say that Christianity is “a sacrif...

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. - Jesus When’s the last time you heard a MAGA conservative Christian quote that scripture passage from Jesus on social media? Share it in a sermon? Even acknowledge its existence? These words come only a few sentences within the Sermon on the Mount , Jesus’ seminal message on how his people are to live and move in the world; one...

As news of his shooting first broke, the Jesus-washing of Charlie Kirk’s life by Conservative Christians began almost immediately. My social media feed quickly flooded with urgent pleas of protection made by religious people for a supposed “warrior for Christ” and “devoted man of God.” A pastor I once partnered with posted an emotional video calling Kirk a “man who loves the Lord, stands on the mo...

Charlie Kirk’s murder was a brutal, reprehensible, vile act. It is the kind of despicable disregard for life that all decent human beings should (and largely did) condemn. From the moment news of Kirk’s shooting first surfaced, I witnessed a massive outpouring of genuine care and concern for him and for his family from both the Right and the Left, even as MAGA extremists rushed to weaponize the mo...

We all have a story we tell ourselves: about what we value, about who we are, about our presence in this world. It’s a narrative that we’ve spent our entire lives carefully crafting, made of equal parts aspiration, denial, and wishful thinking; one that forms our sense of self and how we imagine others see us. And somehow, miraculously, in each of these internal autobiographies, we are all the goo...

As I watched a group of survivors of abuse standing outside our nation’s Capitol vowing to release the names of the monsters who collaborated with Jeffrey Epstein in their violation, I had two immediate thoughts: The first was: the courage of these women is beyond measure. The next was: this is a second act of violence against them. Let’s be absolutely clear about what we are witnessing in these m...

I t feels like a good portion of this nation is on death watch right now. My social media feed is filled with photos gleefully documenting the markers of his physical deterioration, with rising hope as his public appearances grow more sporadic, with almost giddy prognostications of his departure date from this place. I am not exactly one of those people. Yes, he has been an odious blight upon this...

Well, another week here in the Land of the Free . That means another mass shooting and another round of funerals for healthy human beings violently taken in the middle of radiant, beautiful lives. And once again, all Republican professed Christians can offer shell-shocked, mourning families are three words to compound their pain; three words certain to bring little to comfort them, three words to...

I've battled mental illness fiercely for more than half my life. Over three decades ago, I began to realize I was different from many people (or at least I thought I was). I knew that there was a despair that should come as a natural response when we experience trauma; when tragedy visits us or when we lose someone we love, when bad things happen. I also knew that I was feeling something far more...

Dear Republicans, There’s been another mass shooting today in America. Sadly, this sentence is evergreen at this point, with only the geography and the death toll changing. And before you run down some ridiculous road of misdirection and Fox News fiction: yes, it’s the damn guns. Of course, it's the guns. You're insulting people's intelligence when you claim that it isn't; attempting to gaslight u...

(Obviously, this piece is NSFW, or for sensitive ears.) Many people have a bucket list of some kind: a collection of goals and tasks they’d like to eventually cross off before their time here is finished. In a perfect world, that would all be well and good, but not only is the world we’re in a few million miles from perfect , it is currently rocketing right past imperfect , careening by alarming ,...