Author: John Pavlovitz

WARNING: The following contains spoilers and/or possible spoilers for Marvel’s WandaVision on Disney+ I get Wanda Maximoff. At least, I get what I think I know about her. I get what grief does to your world. In the seconds after my father died suddenly and many times in the nearly seven years since, I’ve had a similar thought: I’d do anything to change this. Literally anything. The moment I took the phone call from my youngest brother and heard in his voice a quiver it’s never had before as he told me the news of my father’s death, I...

Human beings are supposed to have a bottom: a base level of decency that defines us, a place we will not go to because to go there would mean abandoning the very moral givens that tether us to one another — and slipping into inhumanity. We are expected as participants in community to have some ethical boundaries that hedge us in and prevent the very worst of our tendencies from festering to the point they grow toxic and metastasize within us and among us. We live in this world every day alongside countless people in our work and our...

To paraphrase a wise man, “They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.” Every day my timeline is filled with God and Gun “Christians.” The two words are frequently given the same place of adoration. They are spoken of with kindred reverence. They are allotted equal fervor. God. Gun. Those two words are used with such similar frequency on their social media bios, and often so tethered together in their conversations and in their sermons that they are inextricable. And what you realize if you pay attention, is that the God...