Author: John Pavlovitz

I often have people tell me that I’m a hateful human being. Sometimes, these are complete strangers who incessantly lurk like sharks in my Twitter feed, other times estranged family members firing one last injurious email salvo before blocking me from responding, or self-righteous former church friends assuring me that I am going to hell but promising they are praying I will find Jesus before it is too late. For a long time, I would passionately refute these accusations; mounting a fierce defense of my position and offering a ready litany of evidence proving that they have mislabeled me,...

It is open season on American school children. In the wake of nearly two years of a pandemic that has raged furiously through the planet, politically-poisoned, religion-addled people who have spent that time continually moving the goalposts of what they will protest against (distancing, restrictions, lockdowns, masks, and vaccines), have resorted to digging in their heels and making our schools the hill they’re willing to die on. The anti-mask, anti-vax zealots are everywhere around our children, who are desperately trying to simply find normalcy and to learn in the middle of an unprecedented disaster. They are in school board...

In organized religion, one of the central questions has always been and continues to be “Who has it Right?” For millennia, billions and billions of human beings spanning the planet have individually and collectively struggled to correctly discern the source of life, the character (if there is one) of that source, and the implications of that. For some, this has led to fully embracing a precise religious tradition, others to a vague and shifting spirituality that doesn’t quite feel truly at home in any rigid system, and others to be passionately adversarial to religion of any kind, seeing it...