Author: John Pavlovitz

The Conservative Republican movement in America is a case study in what fear does when it fully grips a group of people; the emotional net result of being weaned for decades on a steady diet of culture war rhetoric, targeted disinformation, racial stereotypes, incendiary sermons, and plain ol’ white nationalism. In this environment, the human heart become unable to manufacture empathy for the other, as it finds encroaching enemies everywhere it looks. Someone in the grips of this kind of prolonged enmity can no longer seek the common good, because it doesn’t recognize how our fortunes are tethered together....

Dear Conservative Christians, I wanted to express my sincere regrets at how our recent exchanges have left you feeling. It seems I’ve offended you in some way and I want to apologize for that. I’m sorry you feel persecuted when I confront you, that you feel unfairly judged by my pointed words, or that it seems like I’m being purposefully cruel, as that isn’t my intention. It’s just that sometimes my faith gets the best of me and in my sincere desire to help people I can come off a bit abrasive or rude or intolerant. Come to think...

“I feel like I’m losing my mind.” These words are a continual presence these days. I hear them a couple hundred times a day in one form or another. I read them in desperate social media outbursts. I find them in my inbox from friends and from strangers. I hear them in my own head. They are the symptoms of a shared sickness we now find ourselves afflicted with: a sprawling homegrown mental health crisis, the genesis of which can be traced to a single Wednesday morning in November of 2016. They are part of a growing national neurosis...

I have spoken to a lot of exhausted people recently, even with the good news that many of us have experienced through this country. Though, nationally there was no massive Red Wave as predicted by the pollsters and the media, these activists and caring human beings have been battered by the surrounding flood waters for a long time now. They are self-proclaimed blue dots living in red areas who are tired of fighting what feels like a losing battle. They tell me they are sick of seeing people in their communities ratifying racism, codifying misogyny, and amening homophobia; of...

“Every police officer who killed Tyre Nichols was Black. This cannot be White Supremacy.” These are words spoken and written by people who see the water pouring from their kitchen faucet and don’t think about the long path of the water coming out of it; the circuitous miles of pipes it had to travel to get to their glass and what it passed through on the way over time and space. The officers who killed him were simply the spigot. White Supremacy is the plumbing. The idea that the violence against Black people committed by officers of color here...