Podcast

Keeping It 101: A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion is a grant-funded podcast I co-host and co-produce with Dr. Megan Goodwin.

Keeping It 101 is the podcast that helps our beloved nerdy listeners make sense of religion. Because as we like to say, religion isn’t done with you—even if you are done with religion.

We also like to say that religion is what people do. And the podcast is a way for us to talk about how people do religion, how religion is a global system, and how embedded religion is even in places we think it isn’t (like hospitals, secular governments, and more). When we talk about religion, we’re talking race, gender, class, caste, ability, sexuality, and more.

Keeping It 101 was generously supported by a New England Humanities Consortium Seed Grant in 2020-2021. It is supported by a UVM Humanities Center Public Humanities Fellowship in 2021-2022. In 2022-2023, both a REACH Grant and a Luce-AAR Advancing Public Scholarship Grant will expand our podcast with a combined $24,000 in funding. These grants specifically support accessibility for Keeping It 101, as well as production assistance from Fall 2022 onward. I have served as PI for each of these grants.

We were profiled on the BBC and Broadview Media. We expanded on our season 1 “extracurricular” episode about religion in “RuPaul’s Drag Race” into a co-authored editorial about pop-culture Islamophobia for Religion Dispatches, which has over 18,000 hits at the time of writing. The Vermont Humanities Council recommended Keeping It 101 as an exemplar of New England-based public scholarship.

In 2023, Keeping It 101 received a Wilbur Award of Merit from the Religion Communicators Council.

Keeping It 101 has inspired a book project, Religion Isn’t Done With You. Stay tuned, nerds!