Author: John Pavlovitz

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 traumas and shielded from a multitude of threats that so many people experience as their default setting. I have benefited from and participated in a system that has been set up for me and for people like me to...

Dear Church Leaders, Over the past two decades I’ve been a pastor to students. It has been the greatest joy of my life to be allowed into the trenches of young people’s lives: to have access to their stories and share proximity to their pain. I’ve sat with and listened to thousands of LGBTQ young people, and I’ve had a front row seat to the violence the Church has manufactured and to the depression, self-harm, and isolation it breeds. It’s the thing that grieves me, perhaps more than anything else I encounter in this work: that vast resources and...

Racism is a prolific and creative killer. It is entrepreneurial in its malice and it will use whatever means necessary to eliminate those it is threatened by and fearful of. The breadth of its arsenal and the scope of its tactics are staggering. It will execute young black men in the street and it will assassinate their character on social media. It will shoot human beings with guns and with cell phones. It will enact its violence with knees into men’s necks until they cannot breathe, and with calls to the police feigning their own breathless terror. It will...