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. 18h ago

    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).

  2. 6d ago

    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).

  3. 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).

  4. 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).

  5. 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).

  6. Aug 11

    the anglican church with Rev. Ashley Mathews (ep 3, 22).

    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-king 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 anglican church with Rev. Ashley Mathews (ep 3, 22).

  7. Aug 4

    the disciples of chirst church with Rev. Dr. Don Morrow (ep 3, 21).

    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-waterway 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 disciples of chirst church with Rev. Dr. Don Morrow (ep 3, 21).

  8. Jul 28

    the muslim community with Shahid Sheikh, part 2 (ep 3, 20).

    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-part2 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 muslim community with Shahid Sheikh, part 2 (ep 3, 20).
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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
    118
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 the underview.
  • Show Website
    the underview.

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