CROSSOVER: Turn the Page with Jenn Jordan

In which we discuss all things RINDWY with the fabulous Jenn Jordan for the Syosset Public Library's official podcast, Turn the Page. The library is OPEN, y'all!

As always, be sure to visit keepingit101.com for full show notes, homework, transcripts, & more.

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Megan This is Keeping it 101 at Killjoy's Introduction to Religion podcast, which is part of the Amplify podcast network. We are grateful to live, teach, and record on the current ancestral and unceded lands of the Abenaki and Wabanaki peoples, as well as the lands of one federally recognized native nation, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and seven North Carolina state recognized tribal entities. Increasingly though, native folks are pushing us to forgo land acknowledgements altogether and focus on action items. So let's start with land back. And as always, you can find material ways to support indigenous communities on our website. What's up, nerds? Hi, hello, I'm Megan Goodman, a scholar of American religions, race, gender, and politics. I am not, at least Morganstein first, and I am not a historian of religion, Islam, or South Asia. We both do the race and racialization, but otherwise, Ilyse does the whole world, and you know, I just do my little part. Anyway, hi, hello. We are once again signal boosting a fantastic conversation we had with other smart folks. Today it is the conversation that we had about religion is not done with you with Jen Jordan on Turn the Page, which is the official podcast of the Syosset Public Library, which is located on Long Island, New York. So we were delighted to chat with Jen. We are library kids from way back. We are perpetual library kids. And this was just a lovely way to get to talk about. how the book came together and why we think it matters. So we hope you enjoy the conversation. Jen Welcome to Turn the Page, the official podcast of the Syosset Public Library. Jen Hello everyone. Welcome back to Turn the Page. I'm your host Jen today and I am joined by two authors, two scholars, I mean two people. There's not four people here. They're the same people. And they are here to discuss a book that I found absolutely fascinating. It introduced me to so many cool, interesting new topics and I am so excited. So welcome. could I ask you to introduce yourselves and your babies? Megan Hi, hello, I am Megan Goodwin. I am a scholar of American religions, race, gender, sexuality, politics, and our book is Religion Is Not Done With You, subtitle about maps and power and things. Ilyse Hi, hello, I'm Ilyse Morgenstein -Fuerst. I'm the other author of Religion Is Not Done With You, and I'm a professor at the University of Vermont, and my area of specialization is Islam, race and racialization, South Asia, and global race, imperialism, and power. Jen Wow, yeah, I am so excited to talk about all those things like your research and the book. But first I have a question for both of you. I'm curious about how you met and how your podcast came about. I know that that preceded this book. So yeah, what was your journey to working on this stuff together? Ilyse I was a potential PhD student, we had to go to UNC Chapel Hill, and I was randomly assigned Megan Goodwin's floor as the place I would stay for those very important entry interviews. And if the giggling is not - set the tone. If the giggling is not a tip off, we hit it off immediately and instantly. I would be lying if I said Megan wasn't part of the reason this robust community of graduate students wasn't part of the reason that I chose UNC for my PhD. And then kind of the rest is history, I say as a historian, we hit it off. And the thing no one tells you about graduate school is that. if you don't have a team, you're doing it wrong. And so if we think collaboratively, we think in teams, we think, no one is a genius on their own. And so having Megwin be there from like day dot has been really, influential is almost an undersell of how much this relationship has shaped my own research and thinking. But yeah, random assigned floor. Megan Yeah. I mean, random or the universe just stepping in to make sure that we found each other is how I like to think about it, to be honest. Yeah, no, I would not be the scholar or thinker or human, frankly, that I am without Ilyse and I am grateful for her every single day. Getting in my feelings about it. So the origin story is, yeah, We met, golly, in 2007, on my floor, as you do with your besties, and we had been... collaborating for a decade plus by the time we started talking about doing a podcast together. And it was one of a series of moments where we continue to learn that despite having known each other for almost 20 years at this point, that every time we take on something new, it is really kind of starting over and learning how to work together in different ways, learning how to communicate with ourselves and with other folks in different ways. Initially, the pitch for the podcast, because we both work on race and racialization and politics and power, we wanted to use our expertise to help white folks confront the truth about themselves. So the original pitch was Tea and Crackers. That's great. Thank you. I really love it. And also it's hard to write grants for because here's the thing about Mellon is they're not super excited about SNARK. So which I respect, that's fair. So we wanted to pull something together that felt like it was gonna be helpful and useful truly for us in our classrooms because we didn't imagine that it was gonna become what it became. So the idea was, okay, what can we do that doesn't require us to do research or feel like it's gonna take a ton of prep work to even produce content? And we thought, all right, well, why don't we start at the beginning and just hit all the major points that we have to hit in the first month of class. And then at the very least, we have those so we can use them in our classes and maybe some of our friends will listen and that'll be cute and we'll do like five episodes and then it'll be a cute thing to like put on our CVs that we did. So we launched that cute tiny little project that was gonna be nothing in January of 2020. And I don't know if you know this Jen, but like two months later, some stuff happened and suddenly there was a lot, I would even say a desperate. need for material that could be taught remotely. So our audience grew rapidly and exponentially and now we're in year five, season seven somehow plus a bonus summer season. Six seasons in a - Jen I was about to think like, oh my gosh, this is going to be horrible timing, but that was actually like, sort of, yeah, really, I mean, I hate to use the word good in relation to the year 2020. But you know, you know what I mean. Megan Well, you know what it was honestly is and I don't think that I am in any way alone here that that semester and the following semester so that like half of a spring and a fall I think was the most challenging period of my career. You know, I was well into, you know, a decade plus of teaching at that point, and I am pretty good at it. Like, Ilyse and I are both award -winning teachers. We are really good at this. And it is incredibly humbling and incredibly exhausting to feel like you are really good at something and you are doing your absolute best, you are giving it your most, you're giving it frankly more than you have to give, and you don't feel like you're doing a good job, right? Like, because there is no doing a good job in a time of crisis, there's just doing what you can do. So to have folks come back to us and say, this show made their jobs easier, this show. made it possible for them to connect with their students at a time when connection was really challenging. That, yeah, it was a shitty year. I think it was a shitty year for all of us. But feeling like we had done anything that helped, that made anybody's life even just a tiny, tiny little bit easier, that was amazing. We have a colleague, Christian Peterson, who compiled basically peer reviews of our first season. So we had a number of colleagues record. just reflections on how they've been using the show and what was working for them. And I still honestly get like very reclumps every time I think about it because that that moment of closing 2020 with like, Oh, this, you know, it's not a cure for cancer, but this did actually make a difference in folks lives. That was really amazing. Jen That is amazing. And yeah, I was not a teaching at that moment, but I was TA -ing because I was in grad school myself and watching, yeah, seasoned teachers, professors have to conceive of an entirely new teaching strategy, sort of like in a, in a Fortnite, you know, was like really fascinating and like very impressive working with such like limited means in such a short timeframe. I think some really amazing things happened. And there were, I think, some changes that are good, that stuck around. I think there has been sort of like an opening up of like what type of sources that you can use to do like podcasts. And that's, I'm glad I stuck around. Cool, all right. So I've already gotten like very off course, so that's great. So another question before we get to the book, could you both talk a little bit more about your particular areas of research? and what you think that you bring to each other's works or perspective when you collaborate. Ilyse So I work in Islamic studies, which is a huge field and does not just mean religious texts. It means anything that Muslims have touched or are part of. So that can be like what I do, Islamic history, specifically in South Asia, and especially under British rule. So the work that I've published before has been about rebellion and race, jihad and the way British people use jihad. kind of like we do as a label for hate and a label to homogenize Muslims into a legal category. I also work on nationalism and imperialism and how race shows up in our law. So I've got all of that going and I think about religious hatred. So basically a stone cold bummer. Anything you are not supposed to talk about in polite company, that's what I'm doing. polite company. And I think what I bring to Megan is the sense of international and global connection, right? Like I am trained not in the United States. I do not do United States history, even though the United States shows up all the place because cultural imperialism and global war and American dollars. Mm -hmm. But I bring this kind of like, cool, it's good that you know what's going on in DC. Do you know how that impacted all of these other places around the world? And do you know how that DC moment was actually drawing on these things that come from London or Paris or like whatever? So I think that's our give and take. And in religion is not done with you, I think Jen, you could correct me if I'm wrong, because I haven't read it recently, but we've had to go every other chapter of. here's a domestic kind of chapter and here's the wide lens international chapter. And I think that's kind of what we do. Goodwin, what are you, what's your expertise? Take Jen's question. Megan Okay, I'll take this question. My expertise is really about religious intolerance and heteronormativity and white supremacy in the U .S. particularly since 1980 and the way that that shapes both religious minority communities but also and really where my focus is how groups get minoritized. So my first book, Abusing Religion, looks at the way that we use sex to police and discourage religious difference in and around the FLDS Community Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, American Muslims, and as we were discussing, the Satanic Panic, so imaginary Satanists. My work moving forward is thinking about who benefits from treating specific groups and specific people as cult members or cults. So everything from like. Peoples Temple, Jonestown, the move bombing through the way that Hindu nationalism is actually thriving in the US right now, even though we do a very poor job as Americans at paying attention to what's happening around the globe. And I think the conclusion of the book is going to be Disney and why isn't that a cult. So stay tuned, cults incorporated, the business of bad religion coming at you sometime. I think Ilyse is absolutely correct. in her assessment that like she provides both global scope and historic scope to the way that I was trained. And I think the thing that I want to add there is that she's also really good at helping me remember that when we're talking about social construction, the context really matters. It's so easy, particularly because of the way that the American Academy functions to get into Americans think about it like this. So this is what's happening everywhere and that's just not the case. Race and racialization are categories and power structures that happen everywhere, but racialization in South Asia is not racialization in the US. And that has been really beneficial, I think, to my own work. I think the flip side is that I am more intimately familiar with American history, with the role that white Christian supremacy specifically plays. in both the U .S. and in global context because Ilyse, pointedly and on purpose, stays out of Christianity in terms of what it's doing unless it can be avoided. I also think one of the strengths of our collaboration is that I am a very effective communicator when I want to be and when I've had enough sleep and taken my meds. I think I have played a big role in like celebrating Ilyse's turn toward wanting to share her work more with the public and wanting to branch out and push herself into talking about topics where she's not as intimately and intensely trained, but she is absolutely qualified to comment because of the thinker that she is and the person that she is. So she didn't mention this, but I will. I think her next book is going to be on religion and adoption, which is not for training. but her training has prepared her and her life has prepared her to be a very smart and astute analyst and commentator on this. And I am really excited to see where her work goes next. And I'm really proud of her and I love her at the end. Jen That's beautiful. And that was so fascinating. I am, you know, really, really interested in the ways that your specific areas of expertise sort of combined to tell a story that is like, at once very specific to America, but also international in scope. So moving to the book itself, the title is the second clause in a sentence that is repeated often throughout the book. I will paraphrase, even if you are not done with religion, religion is not done with you. Even if you are done with religion, I'm sorry, religion is not done with you. And yeah, could you, this is a huge idea and the point of the book, but could you begin to talk a little bit about why it is so important to understand religion, even if you yourself are not religious? Well, I think what - Ilyse we try to do in the book is make good on what the title is doing, which is threatening you. The title is a threat. It is a warning. It is a red flag, right? Like this is a we need to pay attention. The title is... Right? Like this. moment because in the United States we are really good at making religion a personal and private decision and as we talk about in the book that has a lot to do with the history of Christianity and the imposition of the idea of Christianity that like when you have a personal relationship with God that is all you need or those like Protestant kind of ideals and we kind of get on everything. It's like, um, it is like my seven -year -old buttering his toast. Right? Like we aimed for the slice and we got it everywhere. Right. And so it's a threat because we can in in in these states and I would say in Western Europe as well, we can pull the fleece over our own eyes and say, well, my religion is sorted. I'm Jewish. I go to synagogue. That is what I care about. I don't care what those folks down the way in this different synagogue or a different church or a different mosque are doing. I live in Vermont, one of the least religious states in the country, and I can listen to folks down the road say, I'm an atheist, who cares about what those religious people are doing? And that's a really good way to lie to yourself. That's a really good way to gaslight yourself as a society, because there is not a part of our law that is not imbued with religion. There is not a part of our the way we tell time that is not imbued with specifically Christian religion, but religion. And so ignoring it, putting it in your head in the sand doesn't make it go away. That's a bad strategy for ostriches and it's a bad strategy for those of us who want to understand the world we live in better. And so the threat of the title is pay attention gang. We are waving, we're like that guy on TikTok waving red flags. Like if you didn't know it, you should know it. I want to show you how you should know it. how you should go. Megan In the immortal words of Christopher Wallace, if you don't know, now you know. Yeah, and I think it can really come off. Yeah. as, oh, frickin' egghead professors think their stuff is about, like, everybody should care about their stuff. And it's not not that. Like, we're dorks, and we care a lot about the stuff that we research. But also, this isn't just pedantic. The stakes are really high because what becomes possible when religion is private and nobody else's business is it makes it very easy and convenient and lucrative to ignore the way religion works in public and the way that religion shapes our institutions. So we can have people making arguments about public spaces that are saturated with Christianity, public monuments that are crucifixes or that are crosses. And we can have a Supreme Court that will say, that's an American cultural symbol, that's not. But okay, that's even just like me running around being offended by things which is gonna happen no matter what. Not paying attention to the way that religion is shaping our world is how you get a Catholic supermajority on the Supreme Court that tells you that your body is not your own, that it actually belongs to the state and the state gets to tell you what you do with it. Like, not paying attention to religion and the way that it shapes our world means the kind of healthcare that you're able to access is limited by the beliefs and policies of somebody's institutions that you don't belong to, that you'll never meet. It these really are life and death conversations and we treat religion like it's a cute hobby for folks who haven't outgrown it instead of a major and truly pernicious force in the world creating conditions of possibility and honestly creating very real conditions of oppression. And I don't want it to sound as though the book is overwhelmingly critical of religion because we're not. in the traditional way. being very religious in the U .S. is understood, but we're both, religion is part of our daily lives. It's part of how we are in the world. Religion has, throughout American history, made incredible things possible. There is no civil rights movement without religion. There is frankly no lasting move toward justice without the involvement of religious people and religious institutions. The thing that we're really trying to get across is that religion isn't an actor. Religion is what people do with it. really deeply want our readers and our listeners because it's also an audiobook, which I think is cool as hell. to realize that religion like any other human created institution is what you do with it. It's possible to do real good. It's possible to do some absolutely unconscionable horrible things. It should not be possible to ignore it. And you are absolutely doing so to your detriment and frankly to the world's detriment. Jen Yeah, absolutely. Um, something really interesting happened while I was reading this book, um, on like, you know, uh, a work break at some point while I was at the middle of the book, um, I flipped over to TikTok and I really hate when I start sentences with like, I saw a TikTok, but I did. And, um, this person pointed out that like, if you go in your iCalendar on your phone, go back to October 1582, there are 14 or 15, there's 11 or so days missing. We just wrote a thing about it, actually. It's all religion. We just wrote a thing about it, actually. It's all religion. And, you know, that is one of the many ways in which religion can sort of remain invisible while also shaping the way that we think about time and the way that time structures our entire society and the way we work and rest and all these things. So yeah, what is my next question? Is it about calendars? Because Ilyse is ready. Ready? Let's talk about calendars. Yeah, because that is such an interesting, you know, way that I think it remains invisible. And that's something that when I was in grad school myself learning about medieval history, my professor used to say a lot that like in the middle ages, religion was like time in that it completely structured their worlds while being visible, you know? So yeah, could we talk a little bit about like calendars and how that all features here? Of course. You're so happy. You're so happy right now. Ilyse You're so happy, you're so happy right now. I mean, honestly, I think it's really funny that I have become known since the podcast started as like the calendar lady. Like if you wanna talk to us about how religion shows up, it's calendars. And it's a quip that I use because I have yet to work at an institution of higher ed where we can manage our multicultural student body and faculty well. And so. Mm -hmm. Everywhere I've worked, there's a religious holiday policy, and it goes something like this. For students whose religious holidays are not honored by the academic calendar, you are entitled to take those days off. You have to tell your professor, though. And so I have fought at every institution I have ever worked at or attended that this is inherently racist. And here's why. And here's why. because the only people whose calendar events get honored on a calendar are Christians. Universities get off for a whole month in December, but Jewish people have to both out themselves as Jewish, in order to benefit from the policy you have to be willing to put in writing, here is my religious background, which demonstrates an institutional insensitivity because there are plenty of religious groups that throughout history have tried to like keep their religious identity on the mum because You don't know if that professor you're asking for a day off for is an anti -semite who's going to be like, cool, cool, cool, you tried really hard on that chemistry exam and you just accidentally failed, right? Like you don't know. So not only that, but also you are the religious minority are then in the position of always catching up and never actually having space. So for my personal life, my sense of time as being Christian has been that has felt oppressive to me since I was the kid. in kindergarten in New Jersey, and the kindergarten teacher gave out Santas or trees. The choice was Santas or trees to color. And I'm so sorry to tell this story where my parents might hear, but I fully stood on the desk in Mrs. Connors kindergarten class and was like, why is this a choice? Santa isn't even real. And it's the first time I was sent to the principal's office because I ruined Christmas. But like, Ruining Christmas was really just, it was literally Hanukkah while I'm being asked to color Christmas trees or Santas, but the calendar doesn't recognize it, the teacher doesn't recognize it, the school district doesn't recognize it. And in the mid eighties in New Jersey, you could be religiously insensitive in a way that wasn't on purpose, right? So we can do harm with our calendars without meaning it. And so for everyone, for me, it's like, how does time become an invisible place where we don't see religion? There's only one answer to that, and it's that you're Christian. Yeah, that's it. Because Jews know, Muslims know, Hindus know, Baha 'i know, Sikh know, you're Wiccan, you're Pagans, they know. Everyone that is not a mainstream Christian knows that time - Because you have to. Because you have to. because you ha - because I know that in my Jewish calendar, we're in year like 5780, whatever. And I know from my Islamic studies, we're in like a different year for the main Hidra calendar and we're in a different year for the Persian calendar. But for most folks, we're not paying attention to the fact that 2025 is just how many years since Jesus. And so it is both really invisible, but also really pressing and primary for everyone for whom that affects. And so I think that calendars feels to me like this perfect example of to whom, to whom is it? Megan Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Well, and I think the one thing that I want to add here is that, again, this can sound like, oh, you're being so sensitive. And most people know that this is how it works. So get over it, as my mother -in -law would say. Ex -mother -in -law, sorry. That sounded too excited, but she's not gonna listen to the podcast. That's fine. This is a space where real material harm happens. It is not just, oh no, you've had to out yourself, although that is a space of danger. But also we're asking students who are fasting to take exams. We are telling not Christian or not Christianized, secularized students that they don't actually belong, that they're an afterthought. And that does real harm. And also it gets reflected in our other institutions. We also see that, eh, but not you. in way too many places where people are already vulnerable. We see it in prisons, we see it in business places, and it really does affect what's possible. And also, this is a thing that I bring to the podcast, it directly violates what America says its principles are. Like you said, Constitution, that this is a space where the free exercise of religion is not just allowed, but celebrated. So. Ilyse Why do I have to take a sick day? Why do I have to - to celebrate my holiday, but the entire. The end. library is closed for the week of between Christmas and New Year's and I'm not mad librarians deserve time off we should absolutely honor that but time off for time off sake Megan Time off for time off's sake! Ilyse But those are different things. Megan Right, as opposed to baby Jesus was maybe kind of born here, but not actually, but we decided that he was. Time is fake. Calendars I think is one of the clearest ways that we have to articulate, you know, you think this is neutral, it's really not. Maps are another really good one of you think that this is just a neutral way of conveying information. Choices get made in how maps come together, choices get made into how we measure and you time. those choices affect who's frankly safe and welcome and included at work. Like, yeah, I'm witchy and I was working in Northeastern, which is in Boston, Massachusetts. It is hard to get a leftier city. And I still have to worry about like, how is this gonna reflect that I'm, you know, taking off for Samhain? I have to call out witchy. And even in the most understandable work environment, that is a moment of vulnerability that in a - in a country and in institutions that say that they are dedicated to inclusion and equality. Why should we have that extra step? Like not that the Americans with Disabilities Act is in any way well enforced, but the basis of the American with Disabilities Act is that you shouldn't actually have to tell your employer why you need the accommodations that you need. The assumption is people need different things and that applies every bit as much to religious difference as it does to bodily inability difference. Jen So you do talk a little bit about the role of identity in all of this, you know? And I spent a lot of time thinking about that in relation to a little nugget of wisdom that I have heard around here and there without ever actually verifying. But I was reading recently that in terms of like marriage trends that religion and politics have switched places. Like, so it used to be much less common to marry outside of your religion, Uh, but you would know, be more likely to marry somebody who had different political views from you. And that the opposite is now true. And I am kind of curious about like how identity plays a role with that, you know, because like once something becomes identity, it becomes yes, like a spot of vulnerability and something that you can feel like you have to defend when it feels threatened, which I think can explain a lot of like what we see happening with like Christianity in this country right now, you know, like it feels existentially threatened in a way that like, or it perceives itself as such, you know? Yeah, could you talk about like how identity works here? That was sort of like a mishmash, more of a comment than a question and I apologize. Megan No, no, no, that's, that's cool. And it's actually something that I think about a lot. I think you're right. And I do have data on the way that that shifted not in marriage, but in voting trends, religion used to be more of an indicator than political party. And that has absolutely swapped. But I think also what we're seeing here and not to get too into the weeds on this is what I've theorized is anastrophic politics. So an anastrophe is where you switch orders in a sentence. So like Yoda talks in an anastrophe. listen, you will sort of thing. So one of the things that I pay attention to a lot are where systems and particularly laws get turned on their heads against their original intentions. So this article where we look at anti -clan, Ku Klux Klan anti -masking laws. The idea was to prevent vigilante justice and specifically white supremacist anti -black vigilante violence. And what we're seeing is those laws being weaponized, both against anti -fascist protesters, but also Muslim women who cover. Speaker 5 Hmm. Megan So I think in a bigger way, one of the things that we're seeing around religion and politics and this move toward identity, making it personal, is one of the places where we see oppressive systems try to make, and this obviously comes directly out of capitalism because it wants everything to be nuclear and individual, shifting our attention away from oppressive systems toward individual people that we can then dismiss as like whiners or outlying cases. or that's a you problem, that's not a me problem, right? So if we think about religion as individual, as like an individual preference, and particularly in this Protestant way of like, well, if it's not working for you, then you just try something else, which is not how community works. It's certainly not how race works, right? It gives us space not to address or oppressive systems. It gives us space to say, this is individual people feeling left out, individual people being harmed and not. we've created systems that do real harm, real violence, frankly on purpose, right? It's a very much like a look over here, like don't worry about them being on the curb. Don't worry about them, I'll be on the curb, man. Yeah, we're basically sharing a brain at this point, so. Jen Well, and it kind of explains, I guess, in the in terms of race, like why people celebrate things like the Green Book, where it's like, oh, you could solve racism if you, you know. Megan Make white people feel better? What? Yeah, yeah. A real fix to racism is making white people feel better, I'm pretty sure. Yeah. No, it's not. That was Sarkozy. Jen And so yeah, that is interesting to me that yeah, like when you purely focus on religion as identity, then you do you do further work to obscure those like systems. Megan Well, and the problem is, again, individual people, and America loves to tell individual people that their problems are their own business to sort, as opposed to, we live in a society, and what if we made it possible for more people to survive and flourish? But that's not a good business model. Actually, it's a great business model, but nobody likes it because we like racism better. Yeah, yeah. America! Jen man. So on that note, I feel like because I think this like interview in general has been doing a great job of demonstrating the book's tone, which started recording I described as both deadly serious and hilariously funny. And so could you maybe Ilyse go first? Could you talk a little bit about how you achieve that tone? Like that's so hard, you know, to like, yes, funny and not use it as a defensive mechanism to soften your message, you know, if that Like how do you use it? Ilyse Yeah, Jen, that's a really good point. I think we are people who don't wanna use humor in that way. I think we're using humor to underline the point rather than soften the point. So the way we did it, there are two answers to this and I'll give you a brief one for both. The first is the technical, which is we took a long time to figure out what we wanted the tone to be. We know how to write as ourselves. We knew how to sort a podcast script. We are literally we are speaking in our own voice. And so if something I wrote didn't feel like Megan, she would just change it on the fly because we're talking. And I'm a monster. Sure. But it took us a long time to figure out tone, like 9, 10 drafts on one chapter where we were like, this is trash, this is trash, this is trash, this is trash. This is trash. Nope, still trash. And then like, when we got there, we got there. And I think finding that balance was really just, as my partner would say, lots of practice. Like how do you get there? You get there through practice. Like, how do you get - But I think the other thing is, is that we, both through the podcast and through teaching and through our own writing and through our own surviving, right, like we work on and have experienced all manner of traumatic stuff. But like I tell my students all the time, my students are always like, you must be watching this hard hitting documentary because I saw it and thought of you. And I was like, no, I watch. exclusively reality dating shows, because on my off time, I am off. Because in the daylight, I am reading neo -Nazi comment sections. Right? I'm reading the last 300 years of hate and hate crimes. And so I'm not watching that newfangled documentary, not unless it's during work hours. And so some of it is that we have developed over the last, you years of talking about and communicating about things that are stone -cold bummers, both with our therapists and with our students. We've developed a way to do it that feels inviting. I tell my students all the time that there are lots of days in my classes, I teach an entire class on religious hatred. Most of our class sessions should leave you in tears if you are a functioning human person. But I can't have my students crying every day because then we will not, our bodies will say too much. We don't wanna listen. And so you learn how to be humorous through the darkness. And I'll do one more, which is I actually credit my own religious upbringing with that worldview. Like it is a stereotype, but it is true. Jews are funny because you kind of need a sense of humor. Otherwise, boy howdy, we are not going to make it. And so I think those sociocultural pieces of my personal life, but also practice. practice, practice, practice, practice together, practice apart, and really an innate, I think we share this innate and cultivated value that things that are worth learning might be challenging and hard, but that doesn't mean they need to be devastating. We can learn about devastation. We can learn. without ourselves becoming numb and cold and black hearted because we actually want folks to go and do something about it. We don't want you to be in despair. We want you to be in a place, and whether that's you, my 18 to 22 year old undergraduates or you, my dad, or you, our book readers, we want you to be able to say, gosh, I didn't know how bad it was, And now that I know... I have a new tool in my toolbox to make this place better. Megan Maryam Kaba says hope is a discipline and I think about that every single day. And I think that being able to find the absurd, to find the ridiculous in things that could very easily make us want to lie down in the road and just never get up again is both a strategy of resistance and a commitment to survival. Um, and I... I think we take that very seriously. I think the podcast, I think the book, and I think our work in general is what one of our favorite drag queens, Alaska, would call a very serious joke. We work on some of the absolute most horrible things that people do to one another. And it is important that people know about that, but it's also really important that they know about it in a way where they feel empowered to actually make change and address the issue. Also, quite frankly, it's a pedagogical strategy. One of the most effective forms of public communication and certainly forms of teaching is the, hey, did you notice you might have thought this but actually that. And if you can do that in a way that actually physically makes your body feel good, you're laughing, it sticks with you in a different way. It just does. And I'll be honest, I don't think I was doing that deliberately when I started, I think. as Ilyse points out, both of us developed this very much as a survival strategy early on, but it is the most effective strategy I think we as a team have, and it's one of the things that really sets the book apart and our work together apart, because it is very hard to achieve that balance, but I feel like we've done a really good job with it. Jen Absolutely, it is such a pleasure to read while also presenting you with things that, you know, hit you with the full impact of their urbanness. But like as somebody who myself has like a really ingrained defensive humor thing where like anytime I begin to get vulnerable, like I am going to turn it into a joke, like I can tell the difference when like humor is trying to soften something or when it is like providing the contrast, like light to dark in order to really throw it into contrast, like at that point. Like I think, yeah, the book just does that so beautifully. And thank you so much for making the time to talk. Of course. Thank you. Really delightful. Megan Again, library kids forever. Jen Thank you so much. Ilyse Pleasure. Yeah, we love library. Jen Love to hear it, thank you so much. Listeners, it's now your turn. Please go check out Religion Is Not Done With You or The Hidden Power of Religion on Race, Maps, Bodies, and Law. It is out in the world right now at the board and as you hear this. So please head to your favorite bookstore, library, wherever you like to go. Yay! All right, it is now time to close this chapter. Speaker 5 It's time to close this chapter of Turn The Page. Join us for the next episode.