Through the center he directs, he has also become influential [4] in scholarly discourses about the public understanding and role of religion globally and the ways those are rooted in its mediation.
His father, Wilbur R. Hoover, was a Minister at the Church of the Brethren in Rocky Ford, and he was thus raised in a religious environment in a small town of 4,000 people.
His dissertation, a qualitative study of the audience for Pat Robertson's 700 Club program, was later published, in revised form, as Mass Media Religion: The Social Sources of the Electric Church (Sage, 1988), in a series edited by Robert White.
He stayed there for six years, becoming Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in Temple's School of Communication and Theater, before he moved to University of Colorado at Boulder in 1991.
[6] In media studies, he is identified with culturalist and interpretivist turns that have deepened and nuanced prior, more objectivist and quantitative directions, demonstrating that such approaches are essential to understanding the complex and layered phenomena circulating around the idea of "the religious."