Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion Podcast · Profs. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin

LIVE! Time Bandits: How Religion and Race Are Taking Your Time (and How to Take It Back)

·1 hr 19 min·2 clips

Google Calendar has been downloaded one half a billion times, yet Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, and Indigenous holidays are still extras.

Keeping It 101 records its first live show at Miami University in Ohio. The room has a little tornado-season tension, and the hosts even point out where people should go if a siren goes off. Megan Goodwin introduces the show and herself, jokes about not being Elise Morgenstein First, and sets up the live format with a self-aware apology for the rougher sound. Nathan French joins the opening and the two quickly frame the night around calendars, race, religion, and the politics of time. The episode keeps returning to a simple claim: calendars are never neutral. They say a calendar is a way of setting one preferred order of the world, and that order is shaped by whiteness and Christian imperialism. They widen the point beyond religion too, comparing it to office hours and lunch breaks to show how ordinary schedules can still be coercive. Their argument is that the way time is ordered matters even when nobody names it ideology. The show keeps returning to white supremacy as part of the underlying structure of the argument, not as a slogan, but as the force sitting underneath supposedly normal habits. That makes the live talk feel less like a lecture and more like a guided audit of everyday life. The hosts then move from diagnosis to homework. Listeners are told to look at the calendar on their phone and ask which holidays it includes by default. They name Christmas as the obvious standard and then ask what else is missing. Ramadan, Yom Kippur, and Diwali come up as examples of observances that may not appear unless someone deliberately adds them. From there they ask people to check other calendars too. Workplaces, schools, and local libraries all get the same scrutiny. The point is to see who counts as present, who gets marked as important, and who gets erased by the system. The audience is invited into the room throughout, even though the hosts keep joking about the weirdness of doing this in a tiny soundproofed closet. The recording ends with thanks to the Miami University crowd, a reminder that the talk came from a public event, and a plug for their forthcoming book, Religion Is Not Done With You. What remains is a blunt, usable lesson about how power hides inside everyday scheduling.

As heard by us

Calendars become a blunt lesson in how power decides whose time counts.

A live campus talk about calendars turns into a sharp, funny argument for the fact that time is never neutral. Megan Goodwin and Nathan French keep widening the frame until the subject is not just holidays, but the way race, religion, whiteness, and Christian imperialism shape…

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Why you'd press play

You want a live, sharp take on calendars, race, and religion, and why time is never neutral.

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