Scott Hoezee

It was not lost on many of my fellow preachers on Sunday that on the very day we celebrate the outpouring of God’s Breath on the church, many black people (and people of all races and ethnic groups) in the…

Let’s stipulate up front: the two topics I will address here are not apples to apples.  Apples to oranges perhaps.  Or perhaps like what was pictured on the cover of the book Freakonomics: a Granny Smith apple with a slice…

If I come across any one of a dozen or so movies while channel surfing, I will almost always stop, pick up the movie wherever it is in progress, and finish watching it.  The Shawshank Redemption, The Untouchables, The Godfather,…

We have all noted at some point the similarities between laughing and crying.  Despite representing opposites poles on the emotional spectrum, the manifestation of each has similar results.  Faces contort involuntarily, eyes narrow, noises emerge from us that are not…

What many Christians are going to miss most about Easter Sunday in five days are precisely the things the actual Gospels mostly also are missing.  Things like fanfare and the blast of brass instruments.  Things like flower-washed landscapes and high-pitched…

Some years back, before we even had The Twelve yet I think, I wrote an article in Perspectives on a strangely powerful benediction that Neal Plantinga and I had been using for some years.  Now seems a particularly apt moment…

Today I will spend part of my afternoon teaching a class at the Handlon Correctional Facility near Ionia, Michigan.  Handlon is home to Calvin University’s only satellite campus where our inmate students are receiving Associate’s and Bachelor’s degrees as well…

My professor of Pastoral Care, Mel Hugen, issued a very straightforward warning to us soon-to-be-pastors: Never say it cannot happen to you.  He meant the committing of a wide variety of inappropriate actions and sins but—no surprise here—he was mainly…

Arthur Brooks and I overlapped one year in the same high school back in the early 1980s when Arthur’s father was a visiting professor for a year at Calvin College.  I did not know him very well but saw him…

Yesterday was one of those odd collisions of events that can nearly be disorienting.  Starting Sunday afternoon and into Monday my social media feeds were clotted with tributes to NBA star Kobe Bryant who died with his 13-year-old daughter and…