wfn.org | Hoover to Lead Seminar for RC Congress 2010

[Worldwide Faith News <wfn@igc.org>]

> 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

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.

http://www.rccongress2010.net/speakers/stewarthoover.shtml