Stewart M. Hoover

Professor of Media Studies in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder

Pre-Congress Seminar:

Global Media, Global Religion: Research on Popular Media and the Remaking of Religions

Workshop:

Stewart M. Hoover is Professor of Media Studies in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he directs the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture and is a Professor Adjoint of Religious Studies and American Studies. He holds both the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hoover is author of The Electronic Giant (Brethren Press), Mass Media Religion: The Social Sources of the Electronic Church (Sage), Religion in the News: Faith and Journalism in American Public Discourse (Sage) and Religion in the Media Age (Routledge). He has co-edited three collections, Religious Television: Controversies and Conclusions (Ablex; with Robert Abelman), Rethinking Media, Religion, and Culture (Sage; with Knut Lundby), and Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media (Columbia University Press; with Lynn Schofield Clark) and the forthcoming Fundamentalisms and the Media (with Nadia Kaneva).

He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Media and Religion and founding co-chair of the Religion, Culture, and Communication Program Unit at the American Academy of Religion.

Global Media, Global Religion: Research on Popular Media and the Remaking of Religions

As we move further into the 21st Century, the media are playing an ever more important role in religion and spirituality. The issue is larger than how religion is covered by journalism, or how religions are represented in television and films, as important as those things are.

All over the world, and in nearly all religions and religious cultures, new ways of mediating, understanding, and experiencing religion and spirituality are emerging. Blogs, YouTube, discussion boards, Facebook and Twitter communities, digital publications of a variety of kinds, and the whole emerging world of the social media, are radically expanding the languages of religion and the contexts within which religion and spirituality are understood and experienced. The media, particularly in the digital age, are also breaking down barriers between religions, making it possible for religious “others” throughout the world to participate in global discourses about religious symbols, meanings, and values.

This seminar will be led by Stewart Hoover and Nabil Echchaibi, two of the world’s leading researchers and scholars of religion and the media. They have conducted research on the mediation of religion both in the U.S. and internationally and have looked in particular at the way the media are changing the religious cultures of Christianity and Islam in the West, in the Middle East, and in the developing world. The seminar will feature results of their research as well as their thoughts about future developments, trends, and implications. There will be ample time for interaction and discussion.

Religion, Media, and Masculinity

There has been a great deal of talk recently about a so-called “crisis of masculinity.” Men’s roles as fathers, as citizens, and as community leaders have been hotly debated, by figures as diverse as Louis Farrakhan, Bill Cosby, prominent members of the Bush administration, and President Obama. Most of these voices assume that religion is a positive force in shaping men’s identities, and “the media” are a negative force.

This workshop will present insights from a recent multi-year study that found that things are not that simple. Professor Hoover and his colleagues conducted in-depth studies with men and families across a range of geographic and religious categories, and found much of interest about the ways that men use their religious, spiritual, and media experiences to shape who they are and how they think about their roles as fathers and members of their communities.