the underview.

Every episode of this season has opened the same way. Cannon fire and the old sounds of Northwest Arkansas. A gospel choir singing Go Tell It on the Mountain. Then static, like someone turning the dial. Then something slower and darker underneath. Thirty-three episodes in, nobody has said on tape what that minute is. On Election Day, the underview steps out of its schedule for a short conversation...

The season comes home. After a reckoning with what the show found in its own region, a sociologist's definition of white Christian nationalism, and a national practitioner's answer to it, the underview returns to the ground with the one guest who has been with it since season two. Dr. Jared Phillips is a historian at the University of Arkansas , director of its new Ozark Studies program,...

Rev. Adam Russell Taylor is president of Sojourners , the national Christian organization that has spent five decades insisting that biblical faith and social justice belong in the same sentence. His story starts with a wedding. His parents married in 1968, one year after the Supreme Court said a Black woman from segregated Louisville and a white man from outside Cleveland were allowed to marry ea...

Arkansas ranks first in the nation in support for Christian nationalism. More than half the state qualifies as supporters or sympathizers in the Public Religion Research Institute's fifty-state study , and almost six in ten white Arkansans do. This episode sits down with the scholar whose research built the scale behind those numbers. Dr. Andrew Whitehead is a sociologist at Indiana Universit...

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....

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: ⁠...

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...

⚠️ 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...

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...

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, Co...

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 fo...

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 i...

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 for...

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...

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...

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 Kum...

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 wi...

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 lea...

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...

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-Mississ...

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 em...

⚠️ 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 t...

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...

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 m...

⚠️ 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 fo...