the underview.

the underview. an exploration of the shaping of our place.

06/16/2026

⚠️ 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.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in this country, in Arkansas, and in this region. To understand the faith of Northwest Arkansas, we have to understand it.

But we didn’t want to start with a megachurch. We wanted a Southern Baptist church whose life is lived in community, where the pastor knows the families and the choices the church makes have to be lived out every week with the same people in the same parking lot.

Pastor Dustin Barton grew up at First Baptist Greenland. Left when a previous pastor weaponized the pulpit during a local political fight that divided the church and harmed the town. Years later, he came back as lead pastor to do the patient work of repair.

This is his story. A conversation about what happens when a church gets too close to the fire of political power. About the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. And about what’s on the other side of division, because something is.

06/09/2026

From hush harbors to becoming a cathedral of resistance, The Historic St. James Missionary Baptist Church has been asking the same question since before 1865: what do we owe the people who don't yet have a place here?

Founded by Squire Jehagen, 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 realities.

Link: https://www.theunderview.com/the-historic-st-james-missionary-baptist-church-with-pastor-jonathan-f-lowder-sr/

06/02/2026

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.

https://www.theunderview.com/the-permission-with-darrel-harvey/

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.

06/02/2026

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.

05/28/2026

⚠️ Content Warning. Episode contains the tragedy of gun violence and su***de. Please take care of yourself as you listen.

How does what is taught on Sunday become part of our public life on Monday?

That’s the question this season is asking. And this conversation with Rev. Dr. Michele Morris at First United Methodist Church in downtown Bentonville is where the question gets real.

A church founded before Arkansas was a state. A pastor who can’t afford to live in the city she serves. A tradition that chose the wrong side of slavery and refuses to pretend it didn’t. A congregation where the prophetic middle isn’t a compromise. It’s a choice.

Two parts. This is the underview. 🎧 Link in bio.

05/26/2026

Two parts. This is the faith of Northwest Arkansas. 🎧

⚠️ Content Warning. This episodes contains the tragedy of gun violence and su***de. Please take care of yourself as you listen.

https://www.theunderview.com/the-first-united-methodist-church-with-rev-dr-michelle-morris-part-1/

season 03: the faith of northwest arkansas.

How does what is taught on Sunday become part of our public life on Monday?

Rev. Dr. Michele Morris calls it the prophetic middle. Not wishy-washy. Incredibly principled. A church where the pantry served 47,000 people last year, no questions asked. A building open seven days a week to nonprofits who can't afford space anywhere else. A pastor who has had to navigate the affordable housing crisis personally, and a congregation now asking what it would mean to build workforce housing on church-owned land in downtown Bentonville.

She talks about how Christian nationalism is antithetical to Christianity, and she says if you read the Gospels and don't get offended, you didn't read them.

First United Methodist Church Bentonville has been on the same corner since 1832. Still here. Still reckoning. Still choosing.

05/26/2026

⚠️ Part 1 contains the tragedy of gun violence and su***de. Please take care of yourself as you listen.

How does what is taught on Sunday become part of our public life on Monday?

That’s the question this season is asking. And this conversation with Rev. Dr. Michele Morris at First United Methodist Church in downtown Bentonville is where the question gets real.

A church founded before Arkansas was a state. A pastor who can’t afford to live in the city she serves. A tradition that chose the wrong side of slavery and refuses to pretend it didn’t. A congregation where the prophetic middle isn’t a compromise. It’s a choice.

Two parts. This is the underview. 🎧 Link in bio.

05/21/2026

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church has been in Fayetteville since 1848. The original building was destroyed in the Civil War. They rebuilt it without a roof/.

178 years later, Rev. Evan Garner is still answering the same question: who belongs here?

His answer: everyone. Before you believe. Before you agree. Before you walk all the way through the door.

New episode of the underview — season 3, the faith of Northwest Arkansas. Link in bio.

05/14/2026

⚠️ This episode contains references to the enslavement of Black communities and the impact of immigration enforcement on immigrant families.

It happened in 1847 at St. Joseph Catholic Church. And it wasn’t a baptism of the Irish families who founded the parish. It was a baptism of enslaved people.

Nearly 180 years later, St. Joseph is one of the most diverse congregations in Arkansas, over 2,100 families from across Latin America, Africa, and beyond. One parishioner said the most multicultural event in his life was just going to mass on Sunday.

Father Jason Tyler has been pastor here for ten years. He was ordained for a place — and he can’t leave. In this conversation, he tells us what it means to hold 2,000 years of saints and sinners, to lead immigrant families through fear, and to offer one word to a fractured world: solidarity.

New episode out now. Link in bio.

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