the underview.

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains adult subject matter and other content that may be disturbing to listeners, including grief and personal loss. Listener discretion is advised.John Ray landed in Elm Springs, Arkansas in 1988 for a one-year Youth With A Mission program he signed up for mostly to prove God was not real. He stayed. Almost four decades later he sits on the leadership team at Vine & Branch Church in Fayetteville, and he describes faith not as a conclusion you reach but as a practice you keep. Belong, become, believe. That is the order his church works in, and he has lived what that order costs. In 2009 his youngest daughter was killed and everything he believed came down to the foundation. A Quaker seminary in Portland gave him something to rebuild with. Then, at the end of 2019, a leadership team split fifty fifty over the role of women in ministry and the inclusion of LGBTQ people looked at the most credentialed person in the room and told him to decide.He did not want the decision. He made it anyway, and a friend had warned him what would follow. Thirty percent leave because they disagree, and that part is clean. Another thirty leave who agree with you but do not want the mess. It was closer to forty. Three hundred people became thirty. They sold the building, bought a smaller one closer to the most diverse part of Fayetteville, and moved worship to 4:30 on Sunday afternoons for people who work the brunch shift. This conversation is about what that cost, and about the cultural force John names without flinching. White Christian nationalism, described not as an insult but as water, the thing you swim in and cannot see, the thing that makes your life easier the more you move with it. He talks about privilege, about the pastors he sits with who have reached the same conclusions and cannot afford to say so, about deconstruction that never gets to reconstruction, and about a redemptive theology that gives a person the backbone to name darkness out loud. He would do it again a thousand times.Episode Webpage:  https://theunderview.com/the-cost-with-john-ray-vine-branch-churchAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

Inside the Hindu temple of Northwest Arkansas on Regional Airport Boulevard in Bentonville, Monica Kumar leads a conversation with Sriman Ubhaya Vedanta Venugopala Swami Gattu, the temple's chief priest, whom his community calls Swamiji. Born into a family of priests in Hyderabad and trained under Sri Chinna Jeeyar Swami, he came to Tulsa in 2001 to serve a new temple there and began driving to Bentonville most weekends the following year, when the local community was perhaps a hundred and fifty families praying in each other's homes. He moved here for good in 2012, the year this building opened. The conversation opens with a Sanskrit prayer and moves through what the Vedas hold as their most basic teaching, why many teachers in his tradition set aside the word Hindu altogether, what a temple gives a community that home worship cannot, and why the sound of Om is understood to make the whole universe answer.Swamiji tells the stories behind Holi and Deepavali as his tradition tells them, describes the temple's blood drives and food collections for the wider region, and explains what he means when he says there are many paths and no conflict between them. Asked the two questions every season three guest is asked, he speaks about what his tradition teaches in a time of clashing perspectives and offers a definition of wholeness that begins with the soul and ends with how we see one another. This episode sits in the season's fourth movement, what is emerging, and asks what a place gains when a community decides to make a piece of ground holy on purpose.https://www.theunderview.com/the-hindu-community-with-sriman-ubhaya-vedanta-venugopala-swami-gattu-northwest-arkansas-bentonvilleAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

Sixty years ago, an American evangelist named Bill Bright carried the gospel to Colombia. A young man heard it, believed it, and started a church. That church became a movement, CENTI, the International Center for Teoterapia, "God's treatment" for the whole person, and grew across sixty countries. Then the movement did what movements do: it sent missionaries. To Miami, New York, Connecticut, Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco. And eleven years ago, to Cave Springs, Arkansas. The gospel America exported came home. It came home speaking Spanish.Pastor Alejandro Rojas leads Iglesia CENTI Arkansas, a Spanish-language congregation meeting in a borrowed sanctuary in Benton County, where, this same summer, the sheriff's office opted into the most intense level of ICE partnership available and one of the church's own members was deported, leaving a family behind in the pews. This is a conversation about teoterapia and healing, forgiveness and fathers, the Good Samaritan and the stranger, raising bilingual kids in the Ozarks, and what wholeness means when spirit, soul, and body finally work together. It's also a question the whole region has to answer: when the faith of Northwest Arkansas arrives from Bogotá, is it welcome? Is it wanted? And can a place love someone's labor without loving their presence?https://www.theunderview.com/the-teoterapia-church-with-alejandro-rojas-inglesia-cristiana-centi-citiAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

This episode turns the microphone around. Since the start of Season 3, listeners have been sending in what they're wrestling with, voice messages, letters, texts, and direct messages, some sharing things they may never have said out loud before. This episode belongs to those voices: a word of encouragement about a church that is flawed yet beautiful, a man who paid a price thirty years ago for standing where a current guest stands now, and a road-trip caller struck by Rev. Evan Garner's words that staying silent about division is a sin. Alongside them, letters trace a hundred years of Ozark faith in a few paragraphs, rural churches that were once the core of mutual aid and survival, and what happened when that care acquired conditions, and a listener discovers a door they never thought was open: "I never thought I could be welcome in a mosque."The episode closes on the hardest question of the batch. A caller asks about the prophetic middle: what is it, where does Jesus stand in it, and what happens to integrity when the poles move, especially when they move at unequal pace? Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris of First United Methodist returns to answer him herself: the middle doesn't move, because it was never a point between positions — it's a commitment to hold the people, and prophecy relocates to wherever the dominant story isn't. Co-hosts close with a reflection on deep listening: the trust it takes to say a true thing out loud, and the posture it takes to hear it all the way to the end of the sentence.Episode link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-responses-with-monica-kumar-mike-ruschAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

Fellowship Bible Church is new to a very old religious landscape. Most of the congregations in this season go back to the 1830s, to circuit riders and brush arbors and the first white settlement of this county. Fellowship starts in 1983, in a living room in Bentonville, with seven couples who spent a year reading the book of Acts and asking whether a church could actually live that way, not just in a person's life, but in a whole region. They wanted their spiritual fingerprints everywhere and their name nowhere. Forty-two years later, Fellowship gathers one of the largest congregations anywhere in Northwest Arkansas on a given weekend, and it is still preaching from the well where it first began.Mark Schatzman grew up Roman Catholic in a military family that moved eleven times in fourteen years, walked away from church at thirteen, and came to faith at eighteen at the University of New Mexico. He arrived in Northwest Arkansas in 2005, almost exactly halfway through Fellowship's history, and was mentored by Robert Cupp, the founding pastor from the living room days. In this conversation he describes a church he insists is an organism rather than an organization, one whose program is its people, a woman with no personal stake in disability who started what became a decades-long ministry, a small group that filled half a garage with canned goods and became Samaritan Community Center, where Schatzman now serves on the Board of Directors. He names politics as the new American religion and explains why he decides what he won't say before he decides what he will, why he draws a hard line between culture wars and cultural apologetics, and what it has cost him. https://www.theunderview.com/the-bible-church-with-mark-schatzman-fellowship-bentonvilleAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

Anglicanism has little history in the Arkansas Ozarks. This is Baptist and Methodist country, shaped by circuit riders and farmer-preachers, later by the Southern Baptist Convention, and later still by the nondenominational churches that arrived as the corporations grew. The prayer book never made it up here. So a congregation that says the same creed every Sunday, kneels to confess, and comes forward every week to receive communion is a genuinely new thing in this place, except that nothing about it is new. The creed is older than the country. The prayer book is older than the state. Christ the King Anglican Church has spent four years in a rented fellowship hall off the interstate, and is now buying a building of its own. The only new thing is the address.The Rev. Ashley Mathews grew up Southern Baptist in a small Arkansas town, in a church where the school principal directed the choir. A turn toward faith at nineteen, at a Baptist Collegiate Ministry table in Mountain Home, set a direction she never left. She studied philosophy, then theology at a Presbyterian seminary in Atlanta, where she saw women teach the Bible for the first time. She found Anglicanism almost by accident, walking into a church in Little Rock precisely because she expected not to feel anything there, and was ordained a priest in the city that formed her. In 2022 she came home. In this conversation she describes the via media as a tradition built out of cooperation rather than victory, why she refuses to hear liturgy as a correction of the traditions people came from, and what it means to pastor a predominantly white, middle-class congregation in the most demographically layered city in Arkansas. She names her fear plainly: that a region growing this fast will come to believe its own affluence can save it, and stop extending one another the benefit of the doubt. And she offers wholeness as shalom, one integrated life, because Jesus didn't have a spiritual life and then the rest of his life. He just had a life.episode link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-anglican-church-with-rev-ashley-mathews-christ-the-kingAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

First Christian Church has stood in Bentonville since 1867, thirteen people in a house, two years after the Civil War, eighty years before Sam Walton opened a store on the downtown square. Today it sits about a mile from the global campus of one of the largest companies on earth, and that nearness is the reason for this conversation. The Reverend Dr. Don Morrow has been senior minister here since 1997, and his doctorate is in a subject Northwest Arkansas almost never preaches: economics and the Bible. What does scripture actually say about money, work, and enough in a place whose entire story is an economic one?This is a conversation about the Disciples of Christ tradition and its open table, where all are welcome and all means all. It is also a conversation about the economics of Jesus manna that could not be hoarded, a prayer for daily bread, a year of Jubilee where debt is wiped clean. Along the way it turns toward the harder questions: the difference between charity and justice, the workers a region calls essential and pays the least, and whether a system doing exactly what it was designed to do can still leave people behind. It is honest, and at moments uncomfortable, and it lands on a table where the radical claim is not that we are undeserving but that we are.Episode link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-disciples-of-christ-church-with-rev-dr-don-morrow-first-christian-church-waterwayAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In part two, Shahid Sheikh refuses the label of victim and names the resilience of a faith that has survived 1,400 years in every political climate. The conversation turns to what Islam actually teaches about economics, power, and human dignity, and how much of it overlaps with values Christianity already holds. Sheikh challenges listeners to ask who profits from the fear of Islam: the industries built on debt, addiction, exploitation, and war that Islam explicitly forbids. He tells the story of structuring an interest-free deal with a Baptist car wash owner who paused and said, "That's in my Bible too." He describes visiting an elderly Christian couple he loves, strong in faith, struggling with rising costs, and gently asking why they're focused on headlines about Iran when their own economic security is being eroded by the systems they defend. Sheikh names Miss Jean, a retired Christian teacher from his childhood in Dalton, Georgia, who baked cookies and taught his siblings English when his father was working two jobs, a woman he prays for to this day. He introduces the concept of ummah, the global Muslim community that crosses every boundary, and the M4C food pantry that serves anyone in Bentonville without questions, theology, or gatekeepers. Asked about his fears, Sheikh worries that Northwest Arkansas will profit from diversity without investing in it. Asked about wholeness, he answers with the opening words of every chapter of the Quran: compassion and mercy. "Any society without compassion and mercy, I don't want to be a part of."episode link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-muslim-community-with-shahid-sheikh-bentonville-islamic-center-part2About the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In part one of this two-part conversation, Shahid Sheikh, president of the Bentonville Islamic Center, traces the journey of Northwest Arkansas's Muslim community from a handful of families gathering in garages, parking lots, and rented hotel halls to a thriving community of over twelve hundred people to build a permanent masjid and community center in Benton County. Co-hosted by Monica Kumar, the conversation opens with Sheikh's personal story, immigrating from Pakistan as a child, growing up in the Bible Belt of Dalton, Georgia, navigating the smell of curry on the school bus and the sting of childhood difference, and eventually choosing Islam as his own faith after a year and a half of studying Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity. Sheikh walks listeners through the foundations of Islam: the Shahada, the meaning of "Muslim" as one who submits to the will of God, and the five pillars that structure a life oriented toward God without exception or time off.The conversation moves into the founding story of the Bentonville Islamic Center, how families pooled their own money, purchased and renovated an old house, and built a place to belong without borrowing from a bank. Sheikh describes the extraordinary diversity within the community, families from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and beyond, and extends an open invitation to any listener who wants to visit the mosque, observe, ask questions, or simply sit and share chai. Monica Kumar draws on her own immigrant experience from Uganda and India to surface shared patterns of sacrifice, displacement, and the fierce determination to give back more than you've received. The episode builds to Sheikh's defining statement on belonging: "Belonging is not only something that you find, it's something you build. And I've chosen, along with the 1,200-plus Muslims in Northwest Arkansas, we've chosen to belong here."episode webpage:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-muslim-community-with-shahid-sheikh-bentonville-islamic-center/About the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

Drive the back roads between Rogers and Pea Ridge and you'll pass a small white church that gave its town a name. Little Flock Primitive Baptist Church was constituted in 1843, planted out of the older Shiloh congregation whose building is now a museum in downtown Springdale. It belongs to one of the oldest and least understood strands of American Protestantismm a people who broke from the wider Baptist world in the 1830s by refusing the machinery of organized religion: the mission boards, the seminaries, the Sunday schools, the paid clergy. They kept the name "Primitive" not because it meant backward, but because it meant original, a return to the apostolic pattern. Family worship, congregational singing with no band and no production, and a conviction that salvation is God's finished work, not a transaction to be earned.In this conversation, Elder Tom Griffin and Deacon Paul Lindsey open the church's original minute books and tell its story: a sanctuary Union troops turned into a hospital during the Battle of Pea Ridge, a town that later incorporated to keep a landfill out, hand-hewn oak beams older than the building they hold up. But the history is only the frame. What these two are really describing is a way of belonging that runs against the grain of a region that measures nearly everything by growth, a church that has never once asked how to get bigger, only how to stay faithful, and that believes it blossoms under burden rather than under plenty. The episode closes with a recording of the congregation's singing, shared as a gift. What can a people who choose to endure teach a place that has staked everything on expansion?Link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-primitive-baptist-church-with-tom-griffin-and-paul-lindsey-little-flock-arkansas/About the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode of the underview, Pastor Gary Wheat of The Assembly in Siloam Springs opens the door to a tradition born on Arkansas soil. The Assemblies of God was founded in Hot Springs in 1914, and the Assembly itself traces directly to the Pentecostal revival in Topeka, Kansas, making it one of the oldest continuously operating AG congregations in the state. Pastor Wheat arrived in 2001 to lead a church that couldn't make payroll and whose elder board had resigned. Over twenty-four years, he chose patience over vision-casting, loved a broken congregation back to health, and built a church whose identity rests on a single word: hope.This conversation explores what it means to lead one church in one place for a quarter century as the community around it changes. Pastor Wheat describes the tension between longtime Siloam Springs residents and newcomers, the realities of pastoring on the Oklahoma border near Cherokee Nation, and the shift from drawing people in to going out and serving, painting fences, cleaning up festivals, partnering with nonprofits. He shares the Monday morning coffee where pastors from different traditions meet as friends first and clergy second, his practice of referring people to other churches when they'd be a better fit, and the Pentecostal conviction that the Holy Spirit falls on everyone without checking credentials. It is a conversation about rootedness, generosity, and what it costs to stay.https://www.theunderview.com/the-assembly-of-god-church-with-gary-wheatAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

After the strategy conversation, co-host Monica Kumar led a different kind of exchange. Robert Burns, Director of the Walton Family Foundation's Home Region Program, shares the arc of his own faith journey: a rural North Carolina upbringing rooted in church every Sunday, a season when faith communities weren't open to who he was, and the community of faith he and his partner Cris have found here in Northwest Arkansas.The conversation moves through loneliness and the gift of invitation, exclusion and the courage to show up anyway, hope after a Category 4 hurricane, and what it means to flourish. A deeply human episode that returns us to the heart of season three: the faith of Northwest Arkansas, and what it does with belonging.Part one covers the WFF Home Region Strategy 2030. Listen there first.https://www.theunderview.com/the-home-region-with-robert-burns-walton-family-foundationAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

When the Walton Family Foundation released its Home Region Strategy 2030 in May 2026, the underview paused its season to ask what it means. Robert Burns, director of the Foundation's Home Region Program, sits down with Mike Rusch and Monica Kumar to walk through the five-year framework guiding hundreds of millions in philanthropic investment across Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta.The conversation covers the strategy's four pillars:  civic infrastructure, community building, entrepreneurship, and career-connected learning, as well as the Foundation's relationship to the NWA Council's Vision 2045, the question of housing affordability, and who this region is ultimately being shaped for.https://www.theunderview.com/the-home-region-with-robert-burns-walton-family-foundationAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

Flagstone Church of Christ in Bentonville was planted sixteen years ago with about a hundred people from an established Church of Christ congregation in Rogers. Its lead minister, Marshall Brown, grew up in Fort Smith, attended Harding University, and spent over a decade in youth ministry before taking a leap into something he hadn't planned, building a new church from the ground up. What emerged was a congregation that Brown describes as "probably the least Church of Christ church" in the area, a community that chose to lead with connection and welcome rather than the doctrinal boundary lines that have historically defined the tradition.The Church of Christ tradition traces its roots to the Restoration Movement of the early 1800s, a radical effort to strip away denominational structures and return to the church described in the book of Acts. That founding impulse was resistance: no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible. But over two centuries, the tradition developed its own unwritten rules, about instruments in worship, about the roles of women, about who counts as truly baptized. In this conversation, Brown wrestles openly with which of those inherited boundaries serve the community and which keep people out. He talks about preaching to a room that includes people from gated communities and people who slept on the floor of the Salvation Army the night before. He names the challenge of building empathy across economic and racial lines in one of the most affluent corners of Arkansas. And he raises a question the tradition may not be ready to answer: is Flagstone a departure from the Church of Christ, or a return to the thing it was always supposed to be?https://www.theunderview.com/the-flagstone-church-of-christ-with-marshall-brownAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of historical violence and harm, and references to sexual and physical abuse within faith communities. Listener discretion is advised.Greenland, Arkansas is a town of about fourteen hundred people, just south of Fayetteville. Highway 71 used to run through it. Then the interstate came, and the town quieted. First Baptist Greenland was planted there in the 1960s. Pastor Dustin Barton grew up at this church. He came to faith here. He served on staff here. He left when a previous pastor weaponized the pulpit during a local political fight that divided the congregation and harmed the community. Years later, he came back as lead pastor to do the patient work of repair.This is one Southern Baptist voice from inside the tradition, not from a megachurch, not from a regional platform, but from a small-town pastor who has lived the consequences of a church getting too close to the fire of political power. Pastor Dustin speaks to the SBC's complicated founding, his Romans 13 read that puts kingdom citizenship before national citizenship, the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation when a community has been hurt, and what it takes to rebuild a congregation and a town after a pulpit has caused harm. https://www.theunderview.com/the-southern-baptist-church-with-pastor-dustin-barton/About the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

From hush harbors to becoming a cathedral of resistance, The Historic St. James Missionary Baptist Church has been asking the same question since 1865: what do we owe the people who don't yet have a place here? Founded by Squire Jehagen, a man who had been held in bondage, in the same year the Civil War ended, St. James has outlasted arson, displacement, and every force that tried to silence it. It housed University of Arkansas students when the university wouldn't. It has fed this community through every generation since Reconstruction. And it is still showing up , organizing prayer vigils for immigrant neighbors swept up in ICE enforcement, running a food pantry that feeds nearly 2,600 people a month, and carrying a prophetic voice that has never been willing to separate Sunday morning from Monday's injustice.Pastor Jonathan Lowder Sr. came to Fayetteville from Georgia with twenty-five years of ministry behind him, shaped by a father who gave away everything he had, tested by grief, and called to a congregation he had never heard of. As an outsider reading this place from the inside, he brings a perspective that those of us who grew up here sometimes can't access. In this conversation, he reflects on what it means to inherit 160 years of resistance, why the question "do you care?" is the only question that matters, and what Northwest Arkansas has the opportunity, and the obligation, to become.Link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-historic-st-james-missionary-baptist-church-with-pastor-jonathan-f-lowder-srAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

Darrel Harvey is the Chief Formation Officer at Workmatters.  Darrel spent more than forty years in ministry, raised in a small Holiness church an hour north of Detroit, ordained young, a planter of churches, a pastor of congregations. When his life changed. What he found on the other side wasn't certainty. It was permission. Permission to doubt, to ask, to loosen his grip and lean into the mystery of a faith he no longer needed to defend. In this conversation, recorded around a single table, he takes us back further than expected, before the New Testament, to a mixed multitude walking out of Egypt,  to argue that if we start the story in the wrong place, we end up drawing lines around who belongs and who doesn't.This is a conversation about wholeness and reckoning. Harvey names the hard things plainly: that doubt is not the absence of faith, certainty is; that an obsession with being right keeps us anxious, grasping, and forever sorting people into who's in and who's out; that it is difficult to follow Jesus in a superpower whose civic religion has its own sacred sites, its own hymns, its own devotion. Alongside co-hosts who push and wonder with him, he opens the door to a different posture, hospitality without an agenda, freedom extended to the neighbor, the image of God stamped on every person. The result is less a set of answers than an invitation: to let the frame crack, to admit it failed us, and to begin again.https://www.theunderview.com/the-permission-with-darrel-harveyAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains the tragedy of gun violence and suicide. Listener discretion is advised.In part two of this conversation, Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris gets into what First United Methodist Church Bentonville is doing right now in the community. The church's Second Street Pantry served 47,000 people last year. Beer & Hymns raised a record $50,000 in a single night for the NWA Children's Shelter. The building is open seven days a week to nonprofits who can't afford space anywhere else. And the lead pastor lives in an RV — because she cannot afford to buy a home in the city she serves. Morris describes the congregation's participation in the ULI Faithful Foundations program and what it would mean to put workforce housing on church-owned land in downtown Bentonville.The conversation turns to Christian nationalism, which Morris calls antithetical to Christianity. She draws a distinction between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Jesus of the culture — and says if you read the Gospels and don't get offended, you didn't read the Gospels. She describes what she calls the prophetic middle: not wishy-washy, but incredibly principled. A place where conservative members and lesbian couples worship side by side. Where the pastor shows up at city council to say quit fighting about God in a civic meeting. And where wholeness means the reign of God — unity without uniformity, all of us together, and that is what God looks like.https://www.theunderview.com/the-first-united-methodist-church-with-rev-dr-michelle-morris-part-1About the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains the tragedy of gun violence and suicide. Listener discretion is advised.First United Methodist Church Bentonville has stood on the same corner since 1832 before Arkansas was a state, before the Civil War, and through nearly two centuries of transformation. In part one of this two-part conversation, lead pastor Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris shares her personal journey from outside the church to the pulpit, including a call to ministry born from a campus shooting at the University of Arkansas that killed her professor. The conversation moves through the Methodist connectional system, where a bishop tells you where to live and who to love, into what it means to lead a church with nearly two hundred years of complicated history, including its time as a Methodist Episcopal Church South. Morris doesn't hide from that inheritance. She reminds her congregation of it. Because you can't build a genuine welcome on top of a history you refuse to name.The episode explores the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, why Methodists sound wishy-washy when they're actually principled, and what it means to find God in Highway to Hell by AC/DC. It is a story about a tradition that has split over moral questions again and again and a church that keeps choosing to stay.https://www.theunderview.com/the-first-united-methodist-church-with-rev-dr-michelle-morris-part-1About the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville was organized on May 23, 1848, making it one of the oldest surviving church in the city. In this episode, Reverend Evan D. Garner, the church's rector, traces a tradition rooted in the Church of England's belief that a parish exists to serve everyone within its boundaries, not just its members. From the founding documents that carry the names of slave owners to a warming shelter that grew from six people to forty-seven in a single winter, Reverend Garner describes what it means for a 178-year-old institution to hold its history honestly while showing up for the most vulnerable people in a rapidly changing region.The conversation explores the Episcopal tradition's parish model, the difference between opening doors and genuinely belonging to a community, and how institutions that have historically held power can do the work of justice without becoming political actors. Reverend Garner articulates a theology where love is not abstract, it should lead to human flourishing, and where wholeness means all of the people, not most of them. Monica Kumar joins for the talk-back, where the two process what it means to hear a pastor say there is no limit to how far his church will go to care for those who are vulnerable.https://www.theunderview.com/the-episcopal-church-with-rev-evan-d-garnerAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains references to the enslavement of Black communities and the impact of immigration enforcement on immigrant families. Listener discretion is advised.St. Joseph Catholic Church in Fayetteville has been part of Northwest Arkansas since 1844 — eight years after Arkansas statehood, before the Civil War, before the university. The earliest recorded baptisms in Fayetteville were performed at this parish in 1847, and they were baptisms of enslaved people: William, son of Bob and Alera; Judith, daughter of Kate. The parish's own history asks, "Would that more were known about these people." In this episode, Father Jason Tyler, pastor at St. Joseph for over a decade, traces the arc from those founding-era sacraments through nearly 180 years of Catholic life in the Ozarks to a congregation that now spans languages, continents, and cultures, with over 2,100 registered families and five weekend masses, including one entirely in Spanish. He reflects on what it means to be ordained for a place, the experience of learning to minister across cultures from Rome to Siloam Springs, and the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a bridge between communities.The conversation moves into the tensions this community is holding right now: immigrant families living in fear of deportation, the Catholic Church's complex global inheritance of both empire and resistance, and the role of Catholic social teaching, the preferential option for the poor, the dignity of work, solidarity, in a region shaped by corporate power and rapid growth. Father Tyler names isolation as his deepest fear and solidarity as his answer, while co-host Monica Kumar joins in a talk-back segment to process what she heard, from the radical welcome of an open door to the unresolved thread of what it means to reckon with a history that begins in enslavement and leads to one of the most diverse congregations in Arkansas.https://www.theunderview.com/the-catholic-church-with-father-jason-tyler-st-josephs-catholic-fayettevilleAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains references to Indigenous removal, the history of enslavement, and the dehumanization of Black communities in the Arkansas Ozarks. Listener discretion is advised.In the conclusion of a two-part conversation, historian Rachel Whitaker of the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History moves from the Civil War era into the twentieth century and the present day. Whitaker reveals the Ku Klux Klan's deep integration with church culture in 1920s Northwest Arkansas, reading from newspaper advertisements where the Klan pledged loyalty to local churches, describing ministers who invited congregations to Klan events, and documenting the organization's use of scripture and Christian vocabulary to justify exclusion, violence, and forced conformity. She traces the direct line between the social enforcement of early frontier churches and the Klan's more extreme methods, noting that the charges were the same, only the consequences had changed.The conversation also holds the stories of resistance and welcome. Whitaker tells the story of a Fayetteville congregation that voted overwhelmingly in the 1950s to welcome a Black college student, whose sister was one of the Little Rock Nine — over the objection of 39 members who signed a petition to block her membership. She names the women of Black churches who sheltered civil rights workers, and contemporary congregations doing justice work today. The episode closes with Whitaker's personal reflection on the relationship between faith and institutional power, and her advice to anyone navigating this landscape: read your sacred texts on your own, and if you're Christian, read the red letters.https://www.theunderview.com/the-history-of-faith-with-rachel-whitaker-part-2About the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains references to Indigenous removal, the history of enslavement, and the dehumanization of Black communities in the Arkansas Ozarks. Listener discretion is advised.In the first part of a two-part conversation, historian Rachel Whitaker of the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History traces the arrival of faith in Northwest Arkansas from the 1820s through the Civil War era. Drawing on church meeting minutes, census records, and primary source documents, Whitaker reveals how early congregations functioned not just as spiritual communities but as institutions of social control, expelling members for minor infractions, defining who belonged and who didn't, and wielding moral authority before formal government existed. She examines the Cumberland Presbyterians at Cane Hill, the Methodist circuit riders, the early Baptist farmer-preachers, and the complex relationship between faith traditions and the institution of slavery in the Ozarks.Whitaker also brings her own story to the table, raised across multiple denominations from Jehovah's Witness to Pentecostal to Southern Baptist, offering a deeply personal perspective on the difference between faith and the institutions that carry it. The conversation traces how churches used scripture to justify both abolition and the continuation of slavery, how enslaved people like Squire Jehagen built their own congregations as acts of resistance, and how the dehumanization required to exclude people from community has never been limited to race alone. This episode establishes the historical ground for Season 3 of the underview.https://www.theunderview.com/the-history-of-faith-with-rachel-whitaker-part-1About the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In the opening episode of Season 3, the underview begins its most ambitious exploration yet: the faith of Northwest Arkansas. From the seat of a gravel bike on a quiet Sunday morning in Benton County, the episode traces the religious history of the Ozarks from the earliest circuit riders and Cumberland Presbyterians at Cane Hill to the founding of Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, and Episcopal congregations, all of which arrived before the towns they would come to define. Drawing on the work of sociologist Émile Durkheim, the episode frames the church as the first institution in the Ozarks, one that built both a structure of meaning and a structure of power. That power watched as indigenous nations were removed, split congregations over slavery, welcomed the Klan through its front doors, and enforced the color line, while in the hush harbors, enslaved people built an invisible church that became a cathedral of resistance.The episode then turns inward, as the host wrestles with his own evangelical upbringing and the growing distance between the faith he was raised in and the faith he sees today. Asking hard questions about how personal belief becomes institutional power, and how Sunday's message shapes Monday's actions, the episode arrives at the central question of the season: how has faith shaped belonging in this place, and whose belonging has it excluded? The episode closes with a phone call to seek perspective that will help guide the season's conversations across traditions, from pastors and historians to scholars and seekers, as the underview explores how what we believe about God shapes what we believe about each other.https://www.theunderview.com/the-faith-of-northwest-arkansas-with-mike-rusch/Music courtesy of https://brianhirschy.com/About the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

Season 3 of the underview traces the faith that built Northwest Arkansas, from frontier revivals to megachurches, from the invisible church of enslaved people to the Spanish-language masses reshaping our region today.This season asks hard questions about religion as both meaning and power. Circuit riders crossed 600 miles to preach personal transformation. Cumberland Presbyterians established Cain Hill a decade before Arkansas was even a state. But religion also watched as indigenous nations were removed, split congregations over slavery, and enforced the color line at its front doors. In hush harbors, enslaved people found in the same Bible a different gospel, one of liberation, and built a cathedral of resistance. We explore how what we believe about God shapes what we believe about each other, and how Sunday's message becomes Monday's action. This is the faith that built this place, broke this place, and might yet be the thing that heals it.https://www.theunderview.com/the-underview-season-3-introduction-faith-northwest-arkansasMusic courtesy of https://brianhirschy.com/About the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

This bridge episode sits in the tension of the current moment. Across two seasons, the underview has traced power in Northwest Arkansas from indigenous removal through racial terror to the displacement happening right now, asking what our institutions resisted and what they accommodated. The answer, consistently, has been accommodation: going along, choosing comfort over confrontation, narrowing the scope of who counts as neighbor. That history matters because we're watching the same choice play out nationally. When cultural agreement breaks down, when we lose our capacity to see each other, all that's left is force. The work ahead isn't shouting louder. It's the slow, patient labor of expanding who we see as "us" through stories, conversations, and relationships. Season 3 turns toward the faith communities of Northwest Arkansas to ask: where are the empathy makers, and how does faith create or breakdown belonging?https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-moment-with-mike-ruschAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

What happens to a community when no one is paying attention? Since 2005, America has lost more than 3,200 newspapers and the number of journalists per capita has dropped from 40 to just 8 per 100,000 people. The consequences are measurable: voter turnout drops, fewer people run for office, and communities lose the capacity to know what's happening to themselves. Bentonville had local journalism since 1857, but when local papers consolidated into regional coverage in 2015, nearly a decade passed without a news outlet focused solely on one of the fastest-growing cities in America.Sam Hoisington, a Bentonville native whose father worked at local newspapers for 30 years before the layoffs came, returned home in 2023 after building a successful news startup in Wisconsin. What he found was a gap. In 2024, he launched the Bentonville Bulletin, and his analysis reveals that 69% of the stories he's published have no equivalent coverage anywhere else. In this conversation, Sam discusses the real cost of growth, the infrastructure challenges facing the city, why belonging and local journalism are deeply connected, and what it takes to rebuild the connective tissue that helps a community see itself.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-journalist-sam-hoisington-bentonville-bulletinAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In Northwest Arkansas, where housing affordability was once the region's greatest draw, working families are increasingly being pushed to the edges. Women with children in their cars are showing up at church doorsteps asking a question congregations struggle to answer: "What do I do? Where do I go?" When Christ and Neighbor Church in Rogers was approached about the Urban Land Institute's Faithful Foundations program, Pastor Scott Page saw an alignment between what his church had been given and what neighbors desperately needed. Land. And a willingness to use it to make a difference.This episode continues the Faithful Foundations conversation by going directly to one of the six churches in the first cohort. Scott Page, a lifelong Ozarker, shares why his church said yes to a program that asks congregations to consider affordable housing development as ministry. He describes the people Christ and Neighbor serves on the gritty east side of Rogers, people who are overlooked and undervalued, who work jobs in plants and live paycheck to paycheck in fear.  And he reflects on holding this dream with open hands, trusting that even if this specific project doesn't happen, the passion for affordable housing and the commitment to neighbors won't stop.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-faithful-foundations-scott-page-christ-and-neighborAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In a region where home prices have jumped 70.9% in five years and median rent has increased by double digits across every major city, affordable housing solutions can feel elusive. But the Faithful Foundations program, created by the Urban Land Institute of Northwest Arkansas, offers a different approach: what if churches could use land they already own to help address the crisis?Candi Adams, Director of Signature Programs for ULI Northwest Arkansas, joins the conversation to discuss how this pilot program brought together six congregations from across the region to learn the fundamentals of real estate development. ULI's research revealed over 1,600 parcels covering 7 square miles owned by more than 650 faith organizations in Benton and Washington counties alone. Adams shares her journey from architect to nonprofit leader, the unlikely partnerships forming between faith communities and real estate professionals, and why hope remains the essential ingredient in this work. From Historic St. James Missionary Baptist Church's vision for HUD housing with hydroponic gardens to Trinity United Methodist's plans for housing the unhoused, these congregations are asking a profound question: how do we use what we have to care for who needs it most?https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-faithful-foundations-candi-adams-urban-land-institute-arkansas-housingAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Perla Guerrero, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland and author of Nuevo South, to explore one of the most significant transformations in Northwest Arkansas history: what happens when a place that was overwhelmingly white through most of the 20th century experiences rapid demographic diversification. Dr. Guerrero shares her own journey as an undocumented immigrant who moved from California to Fort Smith at age 16, drawn by her father's search for work in the poultry industry, and how that experience shaped her understanding of racialization, belonging, and public space in the American South.Through her research and lived experience, Dr. Guerrero helps us understand how Northwest Arkansas responded to the arrival of Vietnamese refugees, Cuban refugees, and Mexican immigrants from the 1970s forward. We explore concepts like acts of spatial illegality, how immigrant communities were tolerated when hidden in factories but criminalized when they became visible in public spaces, and the plantation bloc, the enduring power structures that have controlled racialized labor from slavery through Jim Crow to contemporary immigration enforcement. This conversation bridges historical patterns to the urgent present, examining how regional legacies of racial violence shape who feels welcomed today and asking what community wholeness might look like in a place still reckoning with its past.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-nuevo-south-dr-perla-m-guerreroAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

Solomon Burchfield, Executive Director of New Beginnings NWA, brings both lived experience and professional expertise to one of Northwest Arkansas's most urgent challenges. Growing up in a family that faced the real possibility of homelessness. That formative memory, combined with years working directly with chronically homeless neighbors, has shaped his vision for what he calls "universal dignity," a community where everyone has access to the basic resources needed to survive and thrive.This conversation moves beyond stereotypes about homelessness to examine the interconnected systems that either support people or allow them to fall through the cracks. Solomon explains how housing functions as infrastructure, why exclusionary zoning and NIMBYism create the homelessness we claim to want to solve, and what it would look like for Northwest Arkansas to grow in a way that doesn't push more people to the margins. Through New Beginnings' innovative approaches, including micro-shelter communities, medical respite programs, and mixed-background neighborhoods, Solomon demonstrates that homelessness is a solvable problem when communities commit to housing-first solutions and recognize that everyone's well-being is interconnected. With homelessness increasing 23% in the region and housing costs rising 71% over five years, this conversation challenges us to see the gap between those who thrive and those who struggle not as inevitable, but as a choice we're making about what kind of community we want to build.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-neighborhood-solomon-burchfield-new-beginnings-homelessAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode of the underview, we sit down with Victor Gurel, CEO of Trailblazers, the organization shaping how Northwest Arkansas moves, connects, and imagines its future. From singletrack to city streets, Trailblazers leads the region’s effort to design trails, tunnels, and active transportation systems that connect communities through shared infrastructure. Their work reminds us that movement is about more than recreation; it’s about access, equity, and belonging.Victor reflects on his journey from a gravel road in rural Arkansas to leading one of the state’s most influential organizations in trail and infrastructure development. Through his leadership, Trailblazers is helping Northwest Arkansas see trails not just as amenities, but as essential public spaces that shape how we live, relate, and grow together. This episode explores what it means to build systems of movement that reflect the wholeness of a community, not just its privilege or pace.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-trailblazers-victor-gurelAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode of the underview, host Mike Rusch sits down with Michael Spivey (President & CEO), Brannon Pack (Senior Director of Operations), and Bobby Finster (Project Lead) from the Ozark Foundation to explore the future of the Arkansas Rural Recreational Roads Initiative (R3).As the cycling community in Northwest Arkansas continues to grow, it also finds itself navigating complex divisions, from the All Bikes Welcome mural debate to the conversations sparked by The Ozark Podcast. Yet within these tensions, the Ozark Foundation is building something new: a movement rooted in inclusion, listening, and bridge-building across urban and rural communities.The R3 program, now under the Ozark Foundation, is more than an infrastructure project, it’s an invitation to slow down, see one another, and reconnect with the people and places that define Arkansas. Together, Mike and his guests discuss how cycling can help heal divides, strengthen rural economies, and honor the dignity of every community. From Benton County to the Delta, this conversation explores what it means to build connection mile by mile.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-rural-recreational-roads-ozark-foundationAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode, we sit back down with Andy Chasteen, co-founder of Rule of Three and Oz Gravel, to reflect on the state of cycling in Northwest Arkansas. Andy first joined us in season one to share his vision for cycling as a force for belonging in this place. This follow-up conversation explores how that vision has evolved against the backdrop of national division, local debates, and the ongoing growth of our cycling culture.Andy speaks candidly about the challenges of polarization and how simple practices like a wave on the trail or a shared ride can counteract division. He reflects on the transition of Arkansas Rural Recreation Roads into the Ozark Foundation, the conversations sparked by the Ozark Podcast, and his perspective on the “All Bikes Welcome” mural decision in Bentonville. At the heart of it all is his conviction that cycling can bring people together across differences, creating opportunities for inclusion, bridge-building, and community repair.This episode is both an honest reckoning with the tensions we face and an invitation to imagine how the cycling community can lead with kindness, humility, and shared humanity.Episode webpage:  https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-cycling-community-andy-chasteen-rule-of-three-oz-gravelAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode, we continue the story of the “All Bikes Welcome” mural, this time from the perspective of the artist, Paige Dirksen, whose vision and brushstrokes brought it into being. What began as a joyful community project with more than 80 participants under the 3rd Street bridge at Coler Mountain Bike Preserve became the center of one of Bentonville’s most divisive civic debates.Paige reflects on the joy of creating public art, the harm and exhaustion of months of controversy, and the sobering realization that inclusion itself was put on trial. She shares how public art can reveal both the beauty and the divides of a community, and what it means to hold integrity as an artist when your work becomes the stage for larger struggles over power, identity, and belonging. This episode, paired with our previous conversation with Dr. Rachel Olzer, reveals how art and advocacy intersect in shaping Bentonville’s character and in asking the deeper question: who truly belongs here?https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-mural-with-paige-dirksen-all-bikes-welcomeAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode, Dr. Rachel Olzer, Executive Director of All Bikes Welcome, reflects on what the “All Bikers Welcome” mural symbolizes, the weight of the public fight both personally and professionally, and what it reveals about belonging in Northwest Arkansas. This conversation is not only about a mural, but about who gets to belong in public life, and how a city chooses to shape its character in the face of conflict.The mural itself, designed by artist Paige Dirksen and painted in collaboration with more than 80 community members and the nonprofit All Bikes Welcome, became far more than paint on a wall. Over six months, it sparked one of the most significant civic debates in Bentonville’s recent history. The City Council split 4–4 on whether to require changes, leaving the mayor to cast the deciding vote. For many, it revealed how national ideological politics and religious nationalism had been carried into local government, turning inclusion itself into a point of division.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-mural-with-rachel-olzer-all-bikes-welcome-bentonvilleAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this season two final episode, host Mike Rusch takes us back to the gravel road where the story of Northwest Arkansas began, a road overlooking unmarked graves, a place of silence and memory. From that ground, the season has traced centuries of history: Indigenous nations removed from their homelands, enslaved people forced to labor, families rebuilding after the Civil War, immigrants shaping new communities, and the global systems of capitalism, faith, and labor that continue to define the region today.This episode weaves together the voices of archaeologists, historians, descendants, organizers, and elders who guided us through the hidden stories of this land. It is both reflection and reckoning: a recognition that systems of power and exclusion remain, but also that we hold the possibility of repair, renewal, and belonging. As the season closes, we are reminded that the story of Northwest Arkansas is not finished. It is still being written in the lives of those who call this place home.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-story-of-northwest-arkansas-mike-rusch-conclusionAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

We close this season with the voice of Barbara Carr, great-granddaughter of Aaron Anderson “Rock” Van Winkle, an enslaved boy brought to Northwest Arkansas in the 1830s who became one of the region’s most skilled builders after Emancipation. His hands helped construct homes, courthouses, churches, and Old Main at the University of Arkansas, yet his name was nearly erased from public memory.Barbara’s story is one of pain and perseverance, of uncovering the truth about her family’s role in shaping this place, and of reclaiming a legacy long left out of the historical record. Her voice carries the emotional weight of inheritance, the clarity of lived truth, and the call to remember, repair, and restore. As the final voice of the season, she brings the story of Northwest Arkansas full circle, from the erased graves of the enslaved to the living presence of their descendants.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-the-aaron-anderson-rock-van-winkle-family-barbara-carrAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

Aaron Anderson Rock Van Winkle was born into slavery and is believed to have been one of the first enslaved persons to be brought to Northwest Arkansas.  After emancipation, he became a landowner, father, and community member in Bentonville, Arkansas. But even today, his story remains largely absent from public memory. In this episode, we sit down with local historian Jerry Moore to explore Rock’s life and legacy, and to consider how the stories of formerly enslaved people have been preserved, distorted, or forgotten in the place they helped shape.After the interview, we join Mr. Moore on a tour of three significant sites tied to Rock Van Winkle’s life: the stone farmhouse he owned, his grave at Bentonville Cemetery, and a rarely noticed public tablet at James Berry Park. Together, these places invite us to reflect on how memory is rooted in place and how public recognition is often reserved for only a few.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-the-aaron-anderson-rock-van-winkle-family-with-jerry-mooreAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

From Enlightenment ideals to the myth of the American frontier, the founding ideologies of the United States have long shaped how we define humanity, progress, and belonging. In this episode, Dr. Todd Stockdale invites us to trace how these ideologies, especially the Western liberal view of the autonomous individual, intersected with Protestant theology and national identity. Drawing on the work of John Locke, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, we explore how these frameworks have informed what counts as good and bad, civilized and savage, included and excluded, preserved and erased. And we ask what it would mean to reimagine our shared future not through domination, but through a deeper vision of what it means to be fully human.Dr. Stockdale challenges us to examine how our ideas of justice, freedom, and selfhood have been formed by settler colonial logics, and how healing might begin by telling a different story. This conversation builds a bridge between earlier episodes exploring Indigenous erasure and theological complicity, and the final arc of this season, which seeks to confront systems of race, class, and gender that continue to shape our country and Northwest Arkansas today.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-the-founding-ideologies-dr-todd-j-stockdaleAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

Religion in the South is more than tradition; it’s a force that has shaped politics, belonging, and identity across generations. In this episode, we return to Dr. Jared M. Phillips to ask for a historical view to try and understand where that power comes from, and how it takes root in the South and places like Northwest Arkansas?Throughout the season, we’ve heard guests reference the role of faith, from schools to city planning, from community resilience to systems of exclusion. And while no single episode can capture the full complexity of religion in the South, this conversation asks us to trace the beginnings. What is the origin story of evangelical influence in American politics? How did race, region, and religion become entangled in the modern South? And what can we learn about the Ozarks, and ourselves, by looking at one of the most significant turning points: the rise of President Jimmy Carter?Dr. Phillips helps us unpack how Carter’s 1976 election opened the door for Southern evangelicalism to enter the national political arena. But the story doesn’t end there. We explore how faith communities that once emphasized humility, justice, and community care found themselves swept into a movement intertwining spiritual conviction with political power.This episode doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does offer a starting point. A moment to pause and ask: how did we get here? How have religious identities shaped who belongs, and who doesn’t, in our politics, our policies, and our public life?https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-the-president-religion-in-the-south-with-dr-jared-phillipsAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode, we sit down with Irvin Camacho, a Community Rights Organizer and immigrant advocate based in Northwest Arkansas. Irvin shares how his family's experience—his parents working in the region’s poultry plants—shaped his understanding of labor, language, and belonging. Through his work on language justice, immigrant rights education, and deportation defense, Irvin is at the forefront of organizing efforts to challenge anti-immigrant legislation and support families impacted by detention and deportation.This conversation offers a clear and grounded look at how recent laws and policies in Arkansas are affecting Hispanic and Latino residents, and what it means to live in a place where systems of power often ignore or invisibilize entire communities. Irvin’s voice calls us to listen, to understand, and to ask what it truly means to be in community with one another.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-immigrant-advocate-irvin-camacho-community-organizerAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In Northwest Arkansas, the poultry industry has long been a cornerstone of the region’s economic growth. Behind the refrigerated cases and production lines are thousands of workers, many of them immigrants, whose stories and experiences are rarely part of the public conversation.In this episode, we sit down with Magaly Licolli, co-founder and Executive Director of Venceremos, a worker-based organization advocating for poultry workers in Arkansas. Magaly helps us explore the conditions inside the plants, the structural factors that shape workers’ lives, and the role that community organizing can play in amplifying their voices.Together, we ask: What are the realities faced by the people who keep this essential industry running? How do policies around labor, immigration, and corporate accountability intersect? And what does it mean to build a region where all who contribute to its growth are seen, heard, and valued?https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-laborers-poultry-workers-magaly-licolli-venceremosAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode, we confront one of the most culturally significant topics in Northwest Arkansas: the role of Walmart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt in shaping not only the economy, but the entire identity of the region. These companies have brought immense opportunity, visibility, and resources to Northwest Arkansas. But they’ve also concentrated power in unprecedented ways, influencing housing, labor, immigration, policy, and public life.To explore this history with clarity and care, we’re joined by Olivia Paschal, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia. Olivia’s work traces how these companies rose from the Ozarks and became defining forces in American capitalism. A native of Rogers, her work is rooted in both lived experience and deep academic research. Together, we unpack the values, policies, and conditions that allowed these corporations to flourish here, and the questions we must ask if we want to build a region where everyone can belong.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-companies-olivia-paschal-northwest-arkansasAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

For decades, Latino immigrants have come to the United States in search of stability, opportunity, and a better future. But what brought them specifically to Arkansas—and to Northwest Arkansas in particular? In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Steven Rosales, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Arkansas, to trace the broader arc of Latino migration and the forces, economic, political, and corporate, that shaped where people went and why.Dr. Rosales helps us understand how U.S. immigration policy has long oscillated between invitation and exclusion, welcoming Latino laborers in times of need and then pushing them out once their work is no longer deemed essential. We look at the Bracero Program, the emergence of right-to-work laws, and the rise of poultry and construction industries in the South, especially in Arkansas, as key to understanding why this region became a new gateway for Latino communities.This conversation lays the groundwork for what comes next in our season, connecting labor, immigration, and corporate power to the deeper questions of who belongs and what it costs to stay.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-history-of-latino-immigration-dr-steven-rosalesAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In part two of our conversation with Dr. Jared Phillips, we trace the transformation of the Ozarks from an agrarian culture built on land, memory, and mutuality into a region shaped by corporate industry and consolidated power. We explore how poultry integration, economic policy, and the rise of companies like Tyson and Walmart reshaped Northwest Arkansas, altering not just the economy, but the identity of the place itself. This episode bridges the legacy of civil rights and labor with the next wave of regional change: the rise of Latino immigration, the demand for cheap labor, and the political decisions that continue to define who belongs.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-the-ozarks-with-dr-jared-m-phillips-part-2About the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode, we continue the story of Southeast Fayetteville—this time by examining the systems that helped shape, and often erase, its historic Black community. Architect and former Fayetteville Planning Commissioner Alli Thurmond Quinlan joins us to uncover how zoning policies, preservation rules, and land use codes have operated as tools of exclusion across generations. Building on the firsthand testimony shared in our last episode with Tommie Flowers Davis, we explore how seemingly neutral planning decisions have had deeply racialized consequences.Alli helps us understand how policies like minimum lot sizes, nonconforming use codes, and historic preservation standards have systematically excluded Black residents from housing assistance, infrastructure investment, and neighborhood protection. Together, we ask: how can cities like Fayetteville begin to repair the harm? And how can planning be transformed into a tool for justice rather than a barrier to it?https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-fayetteville-historic-district-alli-thurmond-quinlan-flintlockAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode, we speak with longtime Fayetteville resident Tommie Flowers Davis about the disappearing legacy of Southeast Fayetteville’s Black community—and the movement to establish a Black Historic District before it’s too late. As a native of the neighborhood, a former educator, a developer, and a member of the Fayetteville Historic District Commission, Ms. Davis offers both personal testimony and a call to action. Through her story, we learn about the deep roots of Black families in Fayetteville, and how over time, through policies of exclusion and neglect, much of that history has been erased.We explore how infrastructure disinvestment, zoning barriers, and city planning practices have disproportionately harmed Black residents and made it nearly impossible to access housing preservation resources. But this conversation isn’t only about what’s been lost—it’s about what remains. Ms. Davis helps us understand what it would mean to name and protect this history, not as nostalgia, but as a step toward belonging, justice, and repair in a city that still struggles to tell the full story of who built it.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-the-black-historic-district-with-tommie-flowers-davisAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode, Dr. Michael C. Pierce, labor historian and professor at the University of Arkansas, helps us unpack the deep connections between race, labor, and the struggle for civil rights in Northwest Arkansas. Long before the region was known for corporate giants and suburban growth, it was home to radical union organizing, socialist movements, and even biracial political alliances. Dr. Pierce walks us through this overlooked history, from the coal miners of Sebastian County to the rise and transformation of political figures like Orval Faubus, showing how civil rights were never just about laws or integration, but also about power, work, and who gets to belong.Together, we explore how systems of wealth and political control used race as a tool to divide poor Black and white communities, weakening labor movements and preserving elite influence. We examine how immigration, racial expulsion, and disfranchisement were not only acts of social exclusion but economic strategies. And we reflect on what it means today to live in a region where massive economic power coexists with rising inequality and housing insecurity. This conversation is about more than the past, it’s about the stories we inherit, the ones we ignore, and how honesty might offer a path toward wholeness.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-labor-civil-rights-dr-michael-c-pierce-arkansasAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch

In this episode, we pause the historical narrative of Northwest Arkansas to check in with one of the region’s most important community leaders. Brad Sikorski is the new President and CEO of the Excellerate Foundation, stepping into the role after the transformative season under the leadership of Jeff Webster. With roots in Walmart, Walton Enterprises, and years on Excellerate’s board, Brad brings a deep understanding of both the challenges and the opportunities facing Northwest Arkansas.We talk with Brad about the housing crisis, the future of programs like Upskill and Hark, and how Excellerate plans to serve the people who keep our communities running—educators, caregivers, city workers, and neighbors living on the margins. As affordability, equity, and a sense of belonging are increasingly under pressure, this conversation offers a vision for how institutions can respond with systemic solutions, public-private partnerships, and community-rooted care.https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-brad-sikorski-excellerate-foundation-arkansasAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch