Author: John Pavlovitz

Please Stop Giving Trump Supporters a Stupidity Pass. A friend recently offered a theory that I hear all too often from seemingly reasonable adults right now: Trump supporters are somehow victims of the partisan media/Religious Right Church alternate reality that they’ve been raised in and are still captives of. They’re surrounded by fake news and false stories, and so they aren’t bad people—they just aren’t seeing what we are seeing. We need to be more understanding. I’m sorry but this isn’t an acceptable justification. It may have been in a pre-Internet era, but today there simply isn’t a reasonable...

These are days when gratitude might not come easy. It’s tempting to scan the horizon each morning and to let your gaze rest and fix solely on the things that burden us; on the sorrow-bringers and the treachery they manufacture, on the terror we are daily surrounded by because of their seemingly boundless contempt for life. We can easily allow the perpetual, urgent storm of darkness they manufacture to obscure the light from view, to fool us into believing that the night has fallen on our best days. But this would be a mistake. It would be playing right...

I turned on the T.V. today and saw the horrible news: They’ve kidnapped Jesus at gunpoint. Not terrorists or Atheists or Muslims or career criminals — but American Christians. The image on the screen is heart-wrenching and horrible to witness. They’ve got guns in their hands and Scriptures on their lips, and they’re violently twisting his words until I can’t even recognize them anymore. They’re wearing holsters and crosses, bullets and Bibles. They stand there, surrounding him, claiming to speak for him. They yell a lot about freedom, but it doesn’t sound at all like the kind he spoke...

An oft-repeated quote attributed to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock observed that “in an insane world, a sane man must appear insane.” The statement is actually based on what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote, “a sane person to an insane society must appear insane” in Welcome to the Monkey House. John Pavlovitz expands on that feeling in this essay. I know what you’re thinking. I know you feel something breaking inside lately; an invisible fracture that only you’re fully aware of. I know the way you walk away from conversations with people you once relied on for wisdom and clarity and...

As I watched my social media feeds fill up over, with hundreds of #MeToo hashtags from women sharing their firsthand experience of sexual harassment or assault, I began to grieve. I grieved for the sheer volume of the revelations, realizing they will still only barely scratch the surface; how many more women are too traumatized, too protective of their privacy, or simply not yet ready to make such personal declarations to an invisible assembly of relative strangers—many of them, the very kinds of men responsible for these wounds. I know how many more women are carrying these terrible stories...

Photo by Gage Skidmore and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 Based on the stories that continue to surface from women in Hollywood, film producer Harvey Weinstein bears all the markers of a serial predator; a man who for years, appears to have exploited his considerable power and position to take advantage of vulnerable women for his own pleasure. If the allegations and the surfaced recordings prove true, they’re as sickening as it gets; a violation of any measure of human decency and humanity. Weinstein is now rightly experiencing the consequences of his allegedly abhorrent behavior. In the wake of...