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

RINDWY: Choosing Case Studies

·22 min·1 clip

Goodwin made chapter one about Boston sports because baseball offers a non-religious way to think about ritual, power, and belonging.

1. Keeping It 101 devotes this episode to how hosts Megan Goodwin and Elise Morgenstein-First chose the case studies in their book "Religion Is Not Done With You," out from Beacon Press on November 5. 2. Goodwin is a scholar of American religions, race, and gender, and Morgenstein-First is a historian of religion, Islam, race and racialization, and South Asia. 3. Their core answer is that cases had to fit each chapter's theme while honoring both hosts' expertise, which led to an "America, not America" alternating structure. 4. Chapter one uses Boston sports and baseball, which Goodwin says has global reach through American imperialism and cultural imperialism, as an accessible way to think about ritual, community, power, and belonging. 5. Chapter two on imperialism pairs the doctrine of discovery, which affected the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia, with Morgenstein-First's South Asia work on borders, nationalism, and redrawn maps. 6. Chapter three on race and religion draws on Sojourner Truth, Native American activism, and the way "religious freedom" fails minoritized religio-racial communities, tied to scientific racism in the United States. 7. Chapter four on sexuality and nationalism uses reproductive justice and law, asking why policies stay restrictive when polls show popular support for abortion access across religions. 8. The final chapter uses airports, which Goodwin describes as places where American global power after 9-11 and local TSA-adjacent policing of religion, race, nation, and sexuality both show up. 9. Morgenstein-First proposed soccer for the sports chapter, but Goodwin kept Red Sox Nation, and they reused Truth's "Ain't I a Woman" speech from season two because the written form made its blackface translation more striking than audio. 10. Good for readers curious about how academic co-authors build a book.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion Podcast