Relational Activism with John Pavlovitz

Relational Activism with John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, activist, and storyteller from Raleigh, North Carolina. A veteran of local church ministry, he is committed to equality, diversity, and justice, both inside and outside faith communities. John’s many books include A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community; Worth Fighting For: Finding Courage and Compassion When Cruelty Is Trending; and devotionals for the seasons of Advent and Lent. His thought-provoking blog, Stuff That Needs to Be Said, has reached a diverse worldwide audience with over one hundred million views. Seeking a place to connect even more directly with his readers, John launched a Substack platform, The Beautiful Mess [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/], which presently reaches over 116,000 subscribers. John also serves as director of the Empathetic People Network [https://empatheticpeople.com/], a vibrant online community that connects people from all over the world who want to create a more compassionate planet. In this episode, John shares with us his formative faith experiences in both the Catholic and Methodist Churches and how they prepared him for a “relationship with something far bigger than myself.” He explains how he was “drafted into ministry” and why it is so important for faith communities to honor people’s fears, doubts, and uncertainties; ways we can move from a “membership” to a “partnership” culture within our churches; and what he continues to glean from Jesus’s responses to the “collateral damage of the world.” He also speaks to the idea of “compassionate courage” and its link to what he sees as our fundamental task: “to show up as the most honest, most steadfast version of humanity that we can, make our offerings, and realize we’re not going to get to see the whole picture.” Get full access to Tomorrow's American Catholic at www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/subscribe [https://www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Ministering in Images with Thomas Masaryk

Thomas Masaryk is an artist, deacon, and hospital chaplain. He holds degrees in fine arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology and Queens College in New York and has apprenticed with sculptor Donald Miller and master Sicilian wood carver Frank Licitra. Thomas’s work has been featured in individual and group exhibitions, as well as numerous publications in the United States and overseas. Throughout his career he has given professional seminars and demonstrations in the Connecticut, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia areas. In 2008 Bishop William Lori ordained Thomas as a Permanent Deacon in the Diocese of Bridgeport [https://www.bridgeportdiocese.org/] (Connecticut). In 2015, Bishop Frank Caggiano appointed Deacon Tom as Spiritual Director for the English-speaking Cursillo movement, a lay evangelizing movement of the Catholic Church, in the Diocese of Bridgeport. He is the first deacon in the diocese to be appointed to this position. Deacon Tom took a year sabbatical in 2014 to serve as a full-time hospital chaplain at St. Vincent’s Medical Center [https://www.stvincents.org/] in Bridgeport. The experience impacted him profoundly, motivating him to seek an assignment outside the walls of a parish and to reevaluate his artwork. In 2016, Bishop Frank Caggiano granted him a transfer to the Shrine of St. Margaret [https://stmargaretshrine.org/], the official diocesan shrine of Bridgeport, where he has been overseeing the renovation of the shrine’s grounds and statues. In this episode, Deacon Tom takes us through the varied stages of his vocations as an artist and ordained minister. We look at the relationship between creative and spiritual practices, the need to find new sacred stories through visual language, and how Deacon Tom uses guided retreats to “help others find the sacredness of what they do.” Deacon Tom also shares with us what people get wrong about Vincent van Gogh, and why he believes “everybody knows how to create an image in some way, shape, or form.” Get full access to Tomorrow's American Catholic at www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/subscribe [https://www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Interrogating the Tradition with Dr. Amy-Jill Levine

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine is the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Levine has been awarded grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In addition to receiving three audiences with Pope Francis (which she recalls for us here), in spring 2019 she was the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. In 2021, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent books include The Bible with and Without Jesus, co-authored with Marc Z. Brettler, and The Pharisees, co-edited with Joseph Sievers, to which Pope Francis contributed an essay. With Marc Brettler, she co-edited The Jewish Annotated New Testament. She is also the editor of the 13-volume Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings, and The Historical Jesus in Context. She has given close to 1,000 lectures on the Bible, Christian-Jewish relations, and religion, gender, and sexuality across the globe. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Levine about her formative religious experiences and the development of her interest in Christianity and the New Testament, the impact of Nostra Aetate and the Second Vatican Council on Jewish-Christian relations, and various “blind spots and stumbling blocks” Christians might have about the representation of Jews and Judaism in the gospels. Along the way, Dr. Levine shares her thoughts on the rise of lectionary-based faith-sharing communities in the Catholic Church, explores why it is essential to preserve both the “logic and mystery” of Sacred Scripture, and explains why Jews and Christians are both “unfinished products” who can use their shared state as a means of dialogue and collaboration. See also: Faculty page at Hartford International University [https://www.hartfordinternational.edu/faculty/amy-jill-levine] The Pharisees [https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467462822/the-pharisees/], edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Joseph Sievers (Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021) [https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467462822/the-pharisees/] Report on Dr. Levine’s lecture, “Reading the New Testament as Jews: History, Antisemitism, Respect,” [https://www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/p/hartford-international-university]Tomorrow’s American Catholic [https://www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/p/hartford-international-university], March 19, 2026 [https://www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/p/hartford-international-university] “Celebrating the Jewish Annotated New Testament at the Gregorian University,” news brief from the Gregorian University Foundation, April 1, 2019 [https://gregorianfoundation.org/2019/04/01/jewish-new-testament/] Get full access to Tomorrow's American Catholic at www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/subscribe [https://www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Humanizing the Border with Mary Fontana

Mary Fontana is an author, essayist, and award-winning poet whose prose and poems have appeared in The Sun, America, BorderLore, Prairie Schooner, and other publications. Her book Strangers in the Province of Joy: Practicing Radical Hospitality on the US-Mexico Border was released in May by Orbis Books. This narrative history of Annunciation House, a house of hospitality for migrants and refugees in El Paso, Texas, where Mary has volunteered for two decades, draws on her personal experience and extensive interviews to tell the story of migration across the US-Mexico border over the past fifty years. In addition to her literary output, Mary has a PhD in Immunology & Pathogenesis from the University of California–Berkeley and did infectious disease research for a decade, all the while volunteering part-time with Annunciation House. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two children. In this episode, Mary shares the history and mission of Annunciation House and its culture rooted in personalism, liberation theology, and “doing small things with great love.” We look at how US immigration policies have changed over time, and how the lack of legal pathways in our current system ultimately endangers migrants’ lives. Mary also explains the importance of “humanizing people and seeing them as worthy of our compassion” and elaborates on the core goal of her book as helping readers “really come to know specific stories of immigrants, migrants, refugees, so that they can feel more of a kinship with them, more of an understanding of why they come.” See also: Mary Fontana’s official website [https://maryfontana.com/] Strangers in the Province of Joy [https://orbisbooks.com/products/strangers-in-the-province-of-joy-practicing-radical-hospitality-on-the-us-mexico-border] at Orbis Books [https://orbisbooks.com/products/strangers-in-the-province-of-joy-practicing-radical-hospitality-on-the-us-mexico-border] “Rio Grande Roulette,” essay at [https://lemonwoodquarterly.com/archives/spring-2025-issue/lemonwood-quarterly-spring-2025-toc/rio-grande-roulette-by-mary-fontana/#RioGrandeRoulette]The Lemonwood Quarterly [https://lemonwoodquarterly.com/archives/spring-2025-issue/lemonwood-quarterly-spring-2025-toc/rio-grande-roulette-by-mary-fontana/#RioGrandeRoulette] Awareness [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/39365/awareness-by-anthony-de-mello/]by Anthony De Mello, a formative influence on Mary’s spirituality [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/39365/awareness-by-anthony-de-mello/] Get full access to Tomorrow's American Catholic at www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/subscribe [https://www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

What Is Yours to Do? with Michele Dunne

Michele Dunne is a professed Secular Franciscan and the executive director of the Franciscan Action Network [https://franciscanaction.org/], a collective Franciscan voice seeking to transform United States public policy related to peace making, care for creation, poverty, and human rights. Before coming to her current position, Michele’s career focused on the Middle East and US foreign policy. From 2006 until 2021, she headed programs focused on peace, human rights, and democracy in the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Atlantic Council. Prior to that, she served for nearly 20 years in the US Department of State, including assignments in Jerusalem and Cairo. She holds a PhD from Georgetown University and currently lives in Washington, DC with her husband. In this episode, Michele shares with us her spiritual journey and the gradual revelation of her Franciscan vocation—what she describes as “the greatest gift that God ever gave me, and also the most challenging and most humbling”—and explores those elements of the “life-giving and life-affirming” Franciscan Rule that have enriched and encouraged her along the way. We take a close look at the work of the Franciscan Action Network and its mission to “inform, inspire, and mobilize” its collective membership of religious communities, local affinity groups, and thousands of individual members across the country. Michele also touches on the relationship between Franciscan spirituality and activism and explains how the Network supports its members in discerning and carrying out their own unique calling. Get full access to Tomorrow's American Catholic at www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/subscribe [https://www.tomorrowsamericancatholic.org/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]