Scott Hoezee

Fighting against heresy is a deep-seated part of church history.  We maybe don’t like to think of Christianity that way.  We prefer to present Christianity as the proclamation of Good News, of the Gospel, of peace and hope and joy.  …

Seventeen years ago Neal Plantinga created a summer seminar titled “Imaginative Reading for Creative Preaching.”  I was privileged to be one of about twenty pastors who took the first version of this seminar, meeting four days a week across four…

Then the devil led Jesus to the entrance of the Jerusalem Farmers Market.   Jesus observed that most people were prudently wearing face coverings and masks to protect from a severe virus that had made many in the Holy City sick…

There have been several reflections here on The Twelve of late related to the current controversy over statues and memorials, including yesterday’s blog by my colleague Rebecca Koerselman.  In this blog I really don’t want to weigh too far into…

Comedian Jon Stewart, original host of the Comedy Central program The Daily Show, may or may not have very many religious sensibilities.  Stewart is capable of some amazing comedy in the skewering of the day’s news—one thinks of the delicious…

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…