the underview.

Mike Rusch
  • 5.0 (14)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Weekly

The underview is an exploration of the shaping of our place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. The underview is a series of discussions within and about the community of Northwest Arkansas. The underview explores our collective understanding and beliefs about the place we live. These discussions will include topics that are foundational to the identity of our region, the history of our communities, the truth of conflict with the land and its people, and the current challenges and opportunities for our community.

  1. 3d ago

    the reckoning with Monica Kumar & Mike Rusch (ep 3, 30).

    In the first week of Season 3, before a single faith leader had been interviewed, a post appeared in a local political group warning people to listen to this podcast with discernment. It quoted the opening episode four times and named co-host Monica Kumar's work in belonging and equity as the lens that would shape what followed. A few weeks later, listeners began sending the opposite message. That the show was platforming churches. That it never asked who those churches actually welcome. That a straight white host would of course feel welcome anywhere. This episode takes both critiques in full, in the writers' own words, and answers them. It explains the method, a narrative interview with the same questions sent ahead to every guest, and why twenty five rooms would have become three if the hosts had argued instead of listened. It names the one line the show would not cross. It tells the story of a community that agreed to participate and then withdrew out of fear for its own safety, and of the largest churches in the region that did not answer the invitation. Then it plays five recordings from pulpits the show chose not to interview. They are not named. They are posted publicly by the churches themselves. They are not the worst of what was found. From there the conversation turns to the thing the season kept running into and could not avoid. White Christian nationalism, present in roughly forty percent of the faith communities surveyed, and the question of what it means for civic life, for city councils and school boards, for who belongs in Northwest Arkansas and on whose authority. This is not a conclusion. It is the turn in the road. Five sermons were played. The research points to hundreds more. The question the episode leaves open is whether this is a handful of loud voices or the groundwater, the current that runs below the surface of the place. The next set of episodes brings in people who have spent their careers studying it. Recorded in Bentonville, Arkansas. https://www.theunderview.com/the-reckoning-with-monica-kumar-mike-rusch 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.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the reckoning with Monica Kumar & Mike Rusch (ep 3, 30).

  2. Sep 29

    the buddist community with Sư Cô Janna Panna (ep 3, 29).

    Episode Webpage:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-buddhist-community-with-su-co-janna-panna 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.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the buddist community with Sư Cô Janna Panna (ep 3, 29).

  3. Sep 22

    the freewill baptist church with Ben Gibson (ep 3, 28).

    Pastor Ben Gibson did not grow up in a Christian home. His earliest memories are the police at the house, and then a kitchen in Colorado where his father, newly and radically saved, poured every ounce of alcohol down the drain. The whole family was baptized together in 1984. Fifteen years later, on the Saturday night before Easter, a patch of ice took his father's life, and a calling arrived that he can only describe as a compulsion. Since 2011 he has pastored Phillips Chapel Free Will Baptist Church in Springdale, the most diverse city in the Ozarks. He teaches his tradition with real care. Free grace for everybody. Congregations that answer to no hierarchy. A church that rewrote its own bylaws to match what it actually believes, traded the youth group for rooms where seventy-year-olds and toddlers pray out loud together, and scattered itself into neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. Since the lockdown lifted it has grown by roughly a quarter every year. And this is the conversation Season 3 has been circling without a guest willing to represent it until now. Gibson has preached on Christian nationalism by name from his own pulpit and claimed the term. At this table he lays the vision out with unusual candor. A nation brought back to Christ, not by force but by conversion, by discipleship, by generations of believers stepping onto school boards and city councils until the laws change and the culture changes. He also says the church was never meant to wield political power, that top-down political rescue is a pipe dream, and that he is not sure America can even be called a Christian nation. Both of those are his words, and the space between them is where this episode lives.  https://www.theunderview.com/the-free-will-baptist-church-with-ben-gibson-phillips-chapel 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.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the freewill baptist church with Ben Gibson (ep 3, 28).

  4. Sep 15

    the cost with John Ray (ep 3, 27).

    ⚠️ 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-church 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.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the cost with John Ray (ep 3, 27).

  5. Sep 9

    the hindu community with Sriman Ubhaya Vedanta Venugopala Swami Gattu (ep 3, 26).

    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-bentonville 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.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the hindu community with Sriman Ubhaya Vedanta Venugopala Swami Gattu (ep 3, 26).

  6. Sep 1

    the teoterapia church with Alejandro Rojas (ep 3, 25).

    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-citi 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.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the teoterapia church with Alejandro Rojas (ep 3, 25).

  7. Aug 25

    the responses with Monica Kumar & Mike Rusch (ep 3, 24).

    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-rusch 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.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the responses with Monica Kumar & Mike Rusch (ep 3, 24).

  8. Aug 18

    the bible church with Mark Schatzman (ep 3, 23).

    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-bentonville 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.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the bible church with Mark Schatzman (ep 3, 23).
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14 Ratings

About

The underview is an exploration of the shaping of our place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. The underview is a series of discussions within and about the community of Northwest Arkansas. The underview explores our collective understanding and beliefs about the place we live. These discussions will include topics that are foundational to the identity of our region, the history of our communities, the truth of conflict with the land and its people, and the current challenges and opportunities for our community.

Information

  • Creator
    Mike Rusch
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    121
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 the underview.
  • Show Website
    the underview.

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