About Bill Hoy



With 35 years of experience in hospice, congregation, bereavement center, and university, William G. (Bill) Hoy is now Clinical Professor of Medical Humanities at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where he has taught since 2012. Prior to his move to Texas, Dr. Hoy directed the counseling programs for Pathways Volunteer Hospice in Long Beach, California, a post he held for nearly 17 years. He is a widely-acclaimed speaker on issues related to death, end-of-life care, bereavement, and funerals; to learn more, email us.

In addition to his graduate education and counseling training, Dr. Hoy holds the Fellow in Thanatology (FT), the highest advance practice credential for counselors and educators in the fields of death and bereavement. For nearly 30 years, he has been a member of the Association for Death Education and Counseling (www.adec.org), an international association of more than 1,500 clinicians and educators working in end-of-life care and bereavement. From 2013 to 2020, Bill served on the ADEC board and completed two terms as the association’s treasurer.

Dr. Hoy’s area of scholarly interest for many years has been in better understanding the role played by the body in funeral rituals around the world and throughout history, and he is widely regarded as an authority on the role of the funeral in the grief process; his research findings are chronicled in Do Funerals Matter? The Purposes and Practices of Death Rituals in Global Perspective (Routledge, 2013). Bill’s newest book,
Bereavement Groups and the Role of Social Support: Integrating Theory, Research, and Practice, also published by Routledge (2016) identifies the factors that seem most important in providing social support to bereaved individuals and families. His research interest with students at Baylor is particularly concerned with examining the role poverty and ethnicity play in the social value accorded to death rituals and other end-of-life choices.

Bill and Debbie Hoy are parents to two young adults and a wonderful granddaughter. They make their home in rural central Texas about 25 miles from the Baylor campus and one of the joys of their life is regularly welcoming Bill's students to their ranch for dinner and fellowship.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Forgetting the Past

Image
William G. Hoy Baylor University On the April 14, 2020 episode of the CBS hit drama NCIS , naval investigators Ellie Bishop (Emily Wickersham) and Nick Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) interviewed a 95-year old Pearl Harbor veteran who quizzed the two. "When was the attack on Pearl Harbor?" he asked and neither could give a date. "How many died on the U.S.S. Arizona?" he asked more fervently, and again, neither could provide a number. "Then bring in the old Marine with gray hair; I'll only talk to him," the older man demanded. In my clinical faculty role at Baylor , I teach History of Medicine --and I know a little of the older veteran's pain. Many of my young students have little sense of the specifics of what has gone before and when it happened, a point I take as dangerous for the culture in general. As George Santayana wisely reminded us: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Throughout the current Coronavirus...
Read more

Poverty in Pandemic

Image
William G. Hoy Baylor University While we are reading a lot about the illness- and death-toll of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic upheaval of securities markets, we are seeing comparatively little about the real impact on the poor, and the new poor of this experience. In my personal devotional time this week, I looked again at Psalm 112 --a text shared by Jews and Christians but whose principles are timeless and trans-religious. Among other things, this author writes of the person who "respects the Lord" and seeks to live a life of righteousness and justice. But, it is verse 9 that speaks volumes to me: " They have freely scattered their gifts to the poor, their righteousness endures forever; their horn will be lifted high in honor " (New International Version). There is no promise of "give and get" here that is so often predicted by the so-called prosperity gospel. Instead, the words are a simple declaration of fact: when we give generously, lit...
Read more

Longing for Martin Luther King

Image
Last spring when the board of the Association for Death Education & Counseling met just before our annual conference in Atlanta, my friend and colleague Louis Gamino, ADEC president last year had arranged for our board to visit the King Center . It was a moving, poignant afternoon. Having grown up in the deeply divided and segregated south of the 1960s, the visit to the King Center rekindled some emotions long buried. Some of us stood in the rain in front of Dr. & Mrs. King's tomb. One stirring moment for many of us came as we sat together in the old Ebenezer Baptist Church where over the PA system, docents regularly replay the audiotape of the last sermon Martin Luther King preached in that church just weeks before his death. It was the same sermon--one in which he retold how he hoped he would be remembered, almost as if foretelling his death just weeks away--that Mrs. King had replayed at his Palm Sunday with friends funeral. The following Sunday morning, a few of us fro...
Read more