Media, Meaning and Work: Men, Vocation, and Civic Engagement

This four-year-long study (2006 to 2010) is part of a larger project supported by the Lilly Endowment. Stewart Hoover and Lynn Schofield Clark are co-investigators of the overall effort. The center’s focus is on questions of masculinity, religion and media, looking at where men get their ideas about masculinity and maleness, how religion and media interact in the construction of these ideas, and about how such identities are expressed in men’s roles as fathers, workers and influences on succeeding generations.

The core of the study is the in-depth qualitative household interviews that have been a particular area of expertise for the center. These interviews seek to develop accounts of informants’ media lives, religious and spiritual lives, ideas about maleness and masculinity, ideas about work and vocation, and ideas about citizenship and civic engagement. In addition to these household studies, a series of located participant-observation studies are underway, as are a series of focus-group studies. Among other things, these efforts will allow comparison of Evangelical, Mainline and Catholic men and families. An intriguing sub-study will compare Evangelical and Mainline seminarians for their ideas and values related to masculinity in relation to the professional ministry.

This project resulted in a book, Does God Make the Man?: Media, Religion, and the Crisis of Masculinity (NYU Press, 2015), by Stewart M. Hoover and Curtis D. Coats