On Friendship and Religion with Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin
Amplified is an audio blog series about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. This month on Amplified, we sit down with Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin, co-creators of the podcast Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Guide to Religion. We hear about their friendship, their entry into podcasting, and their approaches toward anti-racist religious studies work.
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Stacey Copeland 0:01
[Intro Music]
Welcome to Amplified, an audio blog, a podcast about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. I'm your host Stacey Copeland. Today we're joined by doctors Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst two shiny new members of Amplify's sustain stream and the hosts of keeping it 101: A killjoys introduction to religion, Megan and Ilyse, join me for episode two in our special sustain stream feature series that delves into a crucial and always conversation starting question in the world of academic podcasting. Well, why podcast we dig into Megan and Ilyse's unique approach to feminist and frank conversations on religion and highlighting the importance of community building and friendship in the process. They discuss the joys they find in their work, and the urgency of addressing issues related to religion today, particularly in the context of American white Christian nationalism. We'll delve into the inspiration behind the podcast and how they envision the future of keeping it 101. Unpacking religion one topic at a time. Here are Megan and Ilyse.
Megan Goodwin 1:22
I'm Megan Goodwin. I am a scholar of American religions race, gender, sexuality, and politics. I am the founder and co director of the Bardo Institute for religion and public policy, which helps folks who got the training but not the job, make difficult scary but necessary transitions between states of being. I am also the media and tech consultant on the Crossroads project, which is a loose funded project hosted by Princeton that promotes celebrates, and most importantly funds scholarship on Black religious histories, cultures and communities. I am a giant design nerd. Most of my work right now is making websites. I'm the author of Abusing Religion, but as it literary persecution, sex scandals and American minority religions, and I am currently at work on a project called cults incorporated the business of bad religion. And with Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, I co host keeping it 101: A Killjoy's Guide to Religion podcast, and we are in the midst of edits on our very first co authored book, which we are really trying to call religion is not done with you. forthcoming with beacon, hopefully fall 2024.
Stacey Copeland 2:36
And you're equally busy co host, Ilyse.
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 2:40
Oh, hi, hello, I'm Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, the person in question. And I'm a scholar of Islam, specifically in South Asia race, racialization, imperialism, and anything we might call the history of ideas in the study of religion. I am an associate professor of religion at the University of Vermont, where I also direct the Humanities Center, which is good fun. And I'm the author of Indian Muslim minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, as well as the editor of words of experience, translating Islam with Karl Ernst. And I've got this forthcoming podcast book with Megan, like, just super rad and we're really looking forward to as well as a secondary project second monograph called Imperial pandemics racializing religion globally. So we're busy and I guess in my spare time I parent two tiny killjoys who, you know, also, have shown up on the podcast a few times.
Stacey Copeland 3:40
Yeah, unofficial, third and fourth members
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 3:42
Unofficial third and fourth members.
Stacey Copeland 3:44
So thank you both for hopping on amplified this month. We are so excited to have you both involved with amplify when we got the application. It was, you know, officially had to go through the processes very serious executive board discussions, but I mean, how could we not accept the two of you and this amazing project that you've been working o n together? That I think very strongly speaks to the anti racist feminist thinking creatively about what scholarship is heart at the core of Amplify Podcast Network? But what I wanted to do a bit
Megan Goodwin 4:21
Yeah, can I just have a fan girl moment, please.
Stacey Copeland 4:25
Yeah, please go for it!
Megan Goodwin 4:26
I think Ilyse and I would be doing anti racist public scholarship for religious studies work regardless, but I'm not sure we would be doing it via podcast if it weren't for Hannah McGregor. So we we are delighted to be her friendly colleagues at this point. But well, before we were in conversation with Hannah and with y'all, we were massive fans. And we just really appreciate all the work that she's done particularly to promote women and queer folks getting involved in podcasting. So like, when you put out when you all put the call out for like, do you want to come and be part of our network? We I immediately said yes. And obviously, so we're so happy to be here.
Stacey Copeland 5:02
Just making the family that we want in podcasts, and
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 5:06
all worlds in all worlds and elsewhere.
Stacey Copeland 5:08
So I had been listening to Keeping It 101 before you submitted to the amplify podcast network as well. I mean, how can I it's a feminist podcasts, there's only so many intersections of feminism and research in the podcast world. Although increasingly these days, which is exciting. I wanted to hear from the two of you why you decided to get into podcasting in the first place. Because this is a question. You know, we talk about among podcasters quite a bit, and there's a lot of you know, generic how to podcast get into podcasting discussions out there. But it's always a different story, when you actually ask people who've been doing it for a while. And you reflect back on that moment. So why did the two of you decide to get into making Keeping It 101?
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 5:57
Ah, I think some of it is that we are Joy seeking, some of it is that we are friends who are family, and some of it is that neither of us are really YouTubers. Like that's not what we were going to do. No. So the appeal of having our face on the radio was actually quite delightful. But I think I think, like the actual story is that we've been riffing with each other for God, nearly what, 16, seven, seven years at this point. And so these kinds of like, we both describe our work in different ways as stone cold bummers, we both work at these intersections of hate racism, gender violence, nationalism, imperialism, these big ideas that do real epistemological and physical violence in the world. And both of us come from the New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, tri state area in the United States where joking through pain is how we live. And so we've been cracking jokes about our research for years together. And both have add in our own experiences, like lots of teaching awards, and a real commitment to pedagogy. And so I think we both sort of said, We should do something together because we get to work together. And that brings us joy. We think we're very funny
Megan Goodwin 7:09
We're hilarious
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 7:10
And so we should have other folks pay attention to how funny we are. I mean, my goodness, what a limit to like, only have my students really enjoy my forcible comedy show three times a week. And then when we got when we got down to it, it sort of thought, like, oh, actually, there's a there there that there's a way to teach this stuff about religion to an audience that we always really expansively imagined as not just our students, and not just our colleagues, but also like my dad, who's a well meaning guy who goes to the tiny little New Jersey Public Library once a week, but does not have the kind of advanced degrees, he would need to follow along our written work. But also like, doesn't live in, I can't just have my dad come to class every day, we don't live in the same state
Megan Goodwin 7:54
He would though. Lloyd would.
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 7:55
illegal under the stairs, he totally would. But when we put all that together, like how do we find joy? How do we do this teaching thing that we're pretty good at at a different level in a different way, and for a different audience. And podcasting just seems like the correct medium for it.
Megan Goodwin 8:11
I will say, in this as with all things, Ilyse had an actual plan. And I had a lot of enthusiasm, and very poor impulse control. So I was really excited, honestly, about the technical side of things, this was an opportunity to play with a bunch of tech that I haven't, I hadn't had an opportunity to mess around with. And my ADHD brain thinks that that is intellectual chocolate and cannot get enough of it. So I was really delighted to get to play around with new tech, and also have an excuse to play around with Ilyse, which is one of my favorite things to do. But this time, we could call it work. Because Ilyse was the one with a plan. And I am the one with the poor impulse control. She was probably aware ahead of time, how much work we had signed ourselves up for at least more than I had. I had not accounted for that at all. But also we we really I think thought we were going to do five episodes that we would use in our classes. And it would have been a cute experiment. And I could maybe take that back to the work that I was doing training public humanities scholars at the time in case they wanted to do it. And instead what happens is one I think Ilyse is 100% correct in that there was a there there that we had maybe not fully anticipated, both in terms of how much we'd have to say about this, but also I think about who our audience was going to be like we knew Lloyd was going to listen, this is Ilyse's dad, we knew our students would listen because they have to. But we almost immediately started hearing from folks in Public Health from folks in education truly all over the world, folks who are doing social work, got a couple of screenwriters that like popped in, there is a huge public hunger to know more about religion and why it matters. And particularly in the US and thick, we're so starved for non confessional like, and frankly non white Christian narratives around religion that people really responded. It might have. I don't know if I want to say helped. But it certainly we benefit personally audience was benefited from the fact that we launched our show in January of 2020. And then everybody had to be inside for a real long time. And particularly for our teacher, friends, they needed something that would work well with remote teaching and learning. So this was an opportunity, I think, for all of us to realize, oh, wow, you can do really effective and honestly really engaging teaching work at a distance through different mediums like podcasting. so delighted to have discovered that. But yes, of the two of us, I don't know that there was like a here's, here's why I must be a podcaster. It was just like, Ilyse knows a lot about podcasts because she listens to them every day. And I get to play with new software and new hardware.
Stacey Copeland 11:04
I kind of love hearing that you're like, well, we could just make five maybe for the classroom. And then it's almost like you the way that you hear people talk about getting tattoos. I'll just get one, there's one
Megan Goodwin 11:18
Show her your arm Ilyse!
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 11:22
What do you mean? haha
Megan Goodwin 11:22
Yeah, I have no idea what that I think we definitely got hooked. But the other part too, I think that made it worthwhile to keep going is how dialogic, this process has been? I had not expected the community piece of it in that particular time when all of us were so isolated, necessarily for public health reasons. It was amazing to get to be in conversation about this project that we were really excited about with so many folks that we had not expected to be in conversation with. And to have a real like community develop around that was so lovely. We just did a national conference a couple of weeks ago. And we had folks like turn up who didn't know each other who were chatting with each other, who wanted to take pictures of us, which was really sweet, if humbling. And like there's there's a whole like little community there that just wasn't there before. And that that really warms my heart. That makes me feel like we've done something.
Stacey Copeland 12:17
You talked a little bit about not knowing that this would continue on and also thinking back about, you know, the amount of work that is and not realizing that you know what question is coming. And that's the classic. What do you wish you'd known when you started this podcast?
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 12:34
Yeah? workload?
Megan Goodwin 12:36
I mean, workload? Yeah.
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 12:38
Yeah, I come from a long line of Jewish New Yorkers, we know how to plan for the worst. And I had planned for a lot of work. And this exceeded. It exceeded my understanding of how much we're podcasting would be, in part, because it really did take off right away. So there wasn't a slow build. It was by the third episode, we were getting 1000s of downloads. On the first day that we dropped an episode, which, again, we were expecting this to be for our own personal use. And so having numbers like that was so overwhelming. And so I don't know how Megan felt, but for me, it felt like, oh no, we have a responsibility now. Like we have people that are paying attention, and we have a community that we need to answer to, which is how my brain works. And I don't think that's how Megan's brain works.
Megan Goodwin 13:27
No, but I appreciate you so much
Stacey Copeland 13:28
There was an Oh, no, no, oh, yay!
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 13:32
Or like we said, we would do this. And now we have to because we both set a personal goal, but also, there are people paying attention. And so we are, we're doing this. So I think the workload would be a thing. I wish I knew more. And I also think I'm fully ensconced in the tenure system, right. So I had just earned tenure when we launched the podcast. And then I immediately became the Associate Director for the Humanities Center. And so I've been working within the system broken as it is around how do we count public scholarship for tenure files? How do we count that for hiring? How do we count that as not service work, and frankly, not teaching work, but like, the work we're doing is research, we are translating our research for a mass audience. And so I feel like the work also doubled on that side, because now I became this poster child for a successful public humanities project. And so not only was I doing quite a lot of work for the podcast, and all the things we do right, like, we write episodes, and we maintain a website we manage. We write grants, and we manage interns, and we do social media and all that, but I was also doing all of the internal things like using myself as a test case for our annual evaluations around what is the point system that we assigned to podcasting because it's not peer reviewed, but also it exists in the space of research. And so I was doing all of that labor too writing grants and having meetings and doing relentless advocacy, which I'm happy to do, but I hadn't realized that Taking on something like a podcast would have changed my own research portfolio significantly, and changed a lot of the side labor of tenure line academic work within the within both like my university and the Academy kind of writ large.
Megan Goodwin 15:15
Yeah, I'm going to echo all of that I want to underline how much labor particularly Ilyse's done on the administrative side of things, because the only reason we had interns, the only reason we had grant funding is because she did that extra labor, which I think would be enormous at any school. But at a land grant public university. There's so much scrutiny about how finances are handled that it's just watching the amount of work it took for Ilyse to administer a $5,000 grant was absolutely staggering. It felt like a full time job just on its own. So like, incredibly grateful that she has invested in this project. And in me, because I myself, I am neither a planner nor someone who is on close acquaintance with chronological time. So there is I think the the visible public labor, the invisible public labor, and then there's the like private labor of, okay, we want to do this. And also, if it's going to happen, we have different skill sets. So figuring out how to work together, first of all the podcast together and then pulling the book together, which was an entire, entirely different skill set that we then developed together. I think I wish I had known that ahead of time, except knowing myself, if I had known how much work it was going to be, I might have freaked out and been like, you know what, maybe this isn't worth it. After all, I don't know, having to stick with an idea. I love to have an idea. I don't know that I love to execute an idea. But I want to flip it because I feel like the what do you wish you had known question is often like a cautionary tale moment for a lot of folks. And I think that's important. But the other piece that I I wish I could have told myself in the midst of quarantine as an immunocompromised person is like, this is going to matter to folks in a way that only like truly never imagined. And that's gonna sound like tooting our own horn a little bit. But also we have receipts we hear from folks about how much they value this in their teaching how much they're valuing it in their work, how much they're valuing it in their lives. And that's amazing, like, realizing that our both professional and personal relationship was going to really grow and be strengthened by coming up against all of these challenges, both the foreseen, and the deeply, deeply unforeseen. Like, I think I would have found that really inspiring. And knowing that, yeah, we could, and particularly I who, again, I do not like to follow through on a project could keep doing this for so long. With the right partner. That's I don't think I could have imagined that five years ago. And so that's really amazing, too.
Stacey Copeland 17:58
It's always about that balance, right? Like someone having passion, someone having a good Google Calendar, organization skill, you know, like, those are key aspects to a sustained project.
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 18:09
One of us is the chaos muppet, and the other is the order muppet. And you know, who is who
Megan Goodwin 18:14
I'm the Ernie, I accept that
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 18:16
And I'm Bert, I both like to really watch pigeons, and we need, like breakfast happens on time. I don't understand why we're not ready. This happens the same time every day. But I also did, one of the things that I didn't anticipate actually was the way that our friendship becomes this thing that people talk about. And my true joy in life is friends that do stuff together. Like they've managed to make
Megan Goodwin 18:41
[Laughs] it's true
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 18:42
friendship part of their universe, like nothing makes me truly nothing makes me happier. Like if you know, comedy writers, I know if they're friends, I know if they've been friends since college because this is
Megan Goodwin 18:52
Ask her about Mel Brooks, ask her about Mel Brooks
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 18:52
this is my special interest, I really care that people who do creative work get to do it in their communities of care and respect and love and that other people see us as this community of care and love is like one of the greatest joys of my professional career to say nothing in my personal life. So like if I had known that at the start, I probably would have pushed Megan to work even faster. Even though we were already going very fast. [Laughs}
Megan Goodwin 19:19
[Laughs] Very fast. I will say to you because Ilyse brought up the contingency piece. In my wildest dreams I could not have imagined winding up on so many like intro or theory syllabi, which would be humbling and amazing. Just on its own, but as somebody who got the training but not the job, it is weird as hell but also like
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 19:40
It's a a little bit of a flex it's a little bit of flex pretty great
Megan Goodwin 19:43
a little bit I'm just gonna do like a little Alexis Rose Hair flip here like Oh, am I on your syllabi or your students talking about how we define religion? That's wild. And like, again, very humbling, but maybe not as humbling as it should be? Because that feels real good.
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 19:58
Yeah, welcome. Welcome to us
Stacey Copeland 20:03
Yeah, you can strike a pose for that I think. So, one of the things I love asking people who have been in podcasting for you know, you, you've over hit that first year hump, you know, where people are like, am I going to be a podcaster? Yeah, I guess I'll call myself that moment. And I can tell that your friendship is one of the key ways that sustains your podcast, for sure. But what else kind of keeps you going with Keeping it 101?
Megan Goodwin 20:33
part of it is, honestly, I think that the most pertinent driving force for me is the fact that religion just doesn't stop being done with us. Like, we're just never out of stuff to talk about. And it's become, it's always been pressing. But I think particularly in our current political climate, watching the way that white Christian nationalism, religious nationalism more broadly, is doing so much damage and so much violence across the globe, that feels really urgent, in a way that scholarship is not often positioned to respond to urgent crises. So having that kind of immediacy and the platform to be able to address those in ways that are hopefully, well researched, and well articulated has... that feels important, like being able to participate in our second year in the scholar strike and make even a small contribution toward public humanities scholarship addressing anti racism and why that's so necessary and why that's all wrapped up in religion.
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 21:34
Yeah I agree completely. We did not choose the word killjoy in our subtitle accidentally. We didn't get We didn't choose it because we think it's cute. We really citing Sarah Ahmed's informative and pathbreaking work, we really find killjoy to be the framework through which we do our research and our teaching and this podcast, right. Like, I think that we have a radical optimism that is it that runs through the podcast, like we truly seem to teach around, if you know better, you can do better. And also you should know better, like it's not good enough anymore. To not know, it's never been good enough to not know but particularly with all of this information, I mean, we walk around with supercomputers in our pockets. And so there's no reason that we can't be part of that conversation. And for me, you know, I work on Islamic Studies, South Asian Studies, global imperialism, the journals that I publish in, and the languages that I use to research, all of that is really time time intensive. And sometimes it reaches audiences that I want to reach and other times the paywall is way too. It's way too pricey for scholars in South Asia, whom I'm in conversation with, right. And so doing something that is open access and free, and that is with disability in mind, right. So transcripts, and the rest of it, I think, for me actually feels redemptive to the other kinds of work that I have to do, I have to publish in those specialized journals, I need to pay attention to the diacritical marks in whatever language I'm translating that day. Knowing that that is both valuable, but the audience is so small, and I always want the audience to be a little bit bigger, I want my public to be a little bit bigger, because I didn't learn all this for my own. I mean, I did learn for my own benefit. But I think I have something more to say. And I think my research has more of the I come from a family where activism is thought about as drops in a bucket. So every drop in the bucket raises the water, right? I don't think of myself as much more than a drop in a bucket. But I would like for my drops to go in the bucket instead of like fall outside the bucket. And podcasting is one of those places where I can know I know I'm in the bucket. I know, the work I'm putting in is raising the tide a bit. Not a lot, but a bit.
Megan Goodwin 23:47
This is a project that is both about seeking joy. But I think it's also about trying to hold back despair and being able to feel like we can do anything that is making any sort of contribution at a time when everything feels so hard like that. That is really important to me. I think it's really important to us. And I think that's why we're still here.
Stacey Copeland 24:06
I could keep talking to you too, forever, probably. But I also want to be respectful of your time. Was there anything else you particularly wanted to make sure that we chatted about today?
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 24:20
I think it feels important to say that we were excited about Amplify not just because of our of our like fangirling around all the work that y'all have done. But I also think that there's something really radical in the idea of taking a commitment to the people doing work that is research driven on education forward or, and putting us together and in conversation with each other. So I just want to say thank you for the work that you're doing and for letting us be part of the team. There's nothing again, like I said, Nothing makes me happier than a team. And so it makes me thrilled to be part of this team. So thanks, coach. I don't know.
Megan Goodwin 25:01
[Laughs]
Stacey Copeland 25:01
[Laughs] thanks, coach!
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst 25:01
[Laughs] the metaphor went crazy. I was not a theater kid. I was a jock. And so my brain goes to like, I'm glad to be on the bench. Let me let me play. [Laughs]
Megan Goodwin 25:13
[Laughs] I want to just ditto everything that Ilyse said like the another unexpected joy of doing this work is getting to form communities around other smart folks who share our political commitments and who are doing this work too, I think, at a time where despair is so rampant, not that it probably has ever not been. It can feel really isolating, to be working so hard and to feel like you're doing you're accomplishing so little. So getting to be in conversation with folks who care about this the way that we care about this, and we're doing truly excellent work and really blazing maps. That's, that's exciting. And it warms my heart.
Stacey Copeland 26:00
Cute. Okay. We'll leave it there.
Megan Goodwin 26:03
Yeah, we're freaking adorable [Laughs].
Stacey Copeland 26:07
Thanks for listening to the sustain stream series on Amplified. I'm your host, Stacey Copeland, and our project assistant and editor is Natalie Dusek. If you have comments or additional thoughts on our conversation today, or on any of Amplify's initiatives, please do reach out. A special thanks to Megan and Ilyse for joining us on Amplified this month. Make sure to follow us on Twitter, Instagram, or subscribe to our email newsletter on the website for updates and to keep in touch. Thanks for listening to Amplified, a podcast, an audio blog about the sounds of scholarship coming to you from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network.
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Dr. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst is a scholar of religion, race and radicalization, and history. She is currently working on Imperial Pandemics, an academic monograph that thinks about religion and race as global phenomena. She is an associate professor of Religion and director of the Humanities Centerat the University of Vermont. She has been recognized as an award-winning teacherwhose courses are about the history of religion, Islamic practice and history, race and imperialism, and South Asian traditions. She is the author of Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion.
Dr. Megan Goodwin is a scholar of gender, race, sexuality, politics, and American religions. She is the author of Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions(Rutgers 2020). Her next book is tentatively entitled Cults Incorporated: The Business of Bad Religion. She is the founder and co-director of the Bardo Institute for Religion and Public Policy, and the media and tech consultant on the Crossroads Project.
Together they are working on Religion Isn't Done with You, a book drawing upon Keeping It 101.
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Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Guide to Religion
The Feminist Killjoy Manifesto by Sarah Ahmed
Intro + Outro Theme Music: Pxl Cray – Blue Dot Studios (2016)
Written and produced by: Stacey Copeland and Natalie Dusek