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-garner

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

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-fayetteville

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

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-2

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

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-1

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

In Season 3 of the underview, we begin where every honest conversation about faith has to begin with a starting point. Monica Kumar joins as co-host for "the faith of Northwest Arkansas," and this episode is the Monica's story, the work of naming who we are, what we carry, and what we are afraid of as we step into a season-long exploration of how faith shapes place and belonging across the Arkansas Ozarks.

Monica is the founder of Bridging Us, Interim Executive Director of Aiding Survivors of Human Trafficking & Child Abuse, and a former Strategic Consultant with Engage NWA. Born in London to immigrant parents from India and Uganda, she came to Northwest Arkansas twelve years ago and has spent the years since asking how community supports human rights and how a place becomes home. This conversation reaches into Hindu upbringing, evangelical Christian formation, brave versus safe spaces, the burden of the normative experience, and the common hope two very different people can carry together into a season of listening.

https://www.theunderview.com/the-faith-of-northwest-arkansas-with-monica-kumar

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

Before Season 3 moves further into the faith of Northwest Arkansas, this interstitial pause defines the five words the season is built on faith, religion, theology, church, and ideology and asks what happens when their differences are not fully understood. Faith is interior, personal, not available for public examination. Religion is what a tradition carries across generations. Theology is the public reasoning that tradition does about the sacred. Church, or synagogue, or temple, or mosque, is what an institution does in a particular place, with real power to welcome, to exclude, to bless, to bury, to speak, and to be silent. And ideology is a political orientation toward how the world should be ordered, which in our time and place has become very good at borrowing the language of the other four.

https://www.theunderview.com/the-terms-of-faith-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.com⁠⁠
Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe
Host: @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.com⁠⁠
Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe
Host: @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-arkansas

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

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-bulletin

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