Author: John Pavlovitz

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

This week over 150 Evangelical pastors and Conservative Christian leaders released a joint manifesto on sexuality and marriage entitled the Nashville Statement. The Tennessee city’s name was attached to the document, due to the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission’s annual conference in Nashville where the document was ratified. The statement is steeped in churchy language and dusty religious-speak regarding marriage, creation, gender identity, and sexual orientation, which may be difficult for the average ear to decipher, especially if not raised to crack the code of such theological buzzwords. Here is a Plain Language Translation of what’s...

When things in our lives are defective, we get rid of them. When they aren’t functioning properly, when they no longer serve their original intended purpose, when they present a clear hazard to people, we stop using those things. We remove from our presence and from those we love, stuff that has the potential to do more harm to them than good. In those cases we value life enough to protect it from threat. There are Christians sitting in pews and perched in pulpits who need to seriously rethink their God, because their God is hurting lots and lots...

MR. PRESIDENT, Thank you for giving me a name today. I wasn’t quite sure until now, but you helped me find myself. “Alt-Left.” That’s what you said. That’s what you called me, what you called us. Apparently of the two supposedly equally hateful sides in all this, I belong to that one. Opposite us in Charlottesville this week (on the other side), I saw men with torches and handguns, men screaming “blood and soil”, men intimidating clergy, men beating people with pipes, men screaming anti-Semitic slurs, men so fueled with rage for strangers, that one of them plowed his...

As a writer and pastor, my job is to weave together words so that those words will hopefully reach people in their deepest places; to frame the experience of this life in a way that is somehow compelling or creative or interesting, causing them to engage with the world differently than before. But there are times when to do this would be actually be a disservice to reality, when any clever wordplay would only soften the jagged, sickening truth; when clever turns of phrase might succeed in obscuring the horrid ugliness in front of us. Sometimes we just need...