Scott Hoezee

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…

Near as I can tell, there has not been a lot of engagement here on The Twelve with one of the biggest religious news stories in a while: the publication of—and then the reaction to—Mark Galli’s editorial in Christianity Today…

For some years now I have taken the two or so hours it requires to read the entire end-of-year edition of the New York Times Magazine. (I may have even blogged on this before.)  On the last Sunday of the…

In Anne Tyler's 2004 novel, The Amateur Marriage,  we witness a sad series of events. The book's main characters are Michael and Pauline, a pair of World War II-era sweethearts who get married and eventually have three children. But then…

The sabbatical of my colleague Lyle Bierma this Fall presented me the chance to teach the half-semester “Christian Reformed Church History” class for the first time. A couple weeks into the course we were up to the point of tracking…

The group Three Dog Night had it right: “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.”   They may also have been onto something in the next lyric: “Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since…

My wife and I were still newlyweds when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down on November 9, 1989.   I remember sitting in the living room of the seminarian parsonage where we were living on Grand Rapids northwest side and watching…

I decided to try to learn Spanish recently.  In high school and college I learned German and became a German Major at Calvin, attaining a pretty decent degree of fluency some years ago, especially after I lived in Germany on…

We are in quite a moment in the United States (though the world is looking on curiously and even anxiously).  The launching of an impeachment inquiry is, if not exactly a historical rarity, unusual.  The Republic was 92 years old…

The recent movie Yesterday is mostly a light-hearted romantic comedy with a divertingly fun premise.  Although the movie (wisely) never tries to explain it, the premise is that the entire Planet Earth underwent a history-altering event.  For around eleven seconds,…