the underview. | Podcast Guru

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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.

Recent Episodes

the season conclusion with Monica Kumar (ep 3, 35).

The season ends where it began, in the hills. Co-host Monica Kumar walks out at dusk in November, the oaks holding the last of their copper, and takes stock of a year spent at the tables of Northwest Arkansas faith communities. She came in an outsider to the region's majority faith, a non-Christian who grew up Hindu in England and whose picture of American Christianity was built mostly from media, from stories, from what she imagined happened behind the doors. Then she sat with Baptists and D...

37 MIN

the music of faith with Brian Hirschy (ep 3, 34).

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 with the friend who made it. Brian Hirschy is a musician and one of the first people brought int...

33 MIN

the membership with Dr. Jared M. Phillips (ep 3, 33).

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, and a sixth-generation Ozarker who farms above the Muddy Fork of the Illinois River with draft horses. He g...

78 MIN

the more perfect union with Rev. Adam Russell Taylor (ep 3, 32).

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 each other, in a case that carried the name of a couple called Loving. Their son grew up convinced t...

80 MIN

the christian nationalism with Dr. Andrew Whitehead (ep 3, 31).

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 University Indianapolis, co-director of the Association of Religion Data Archives, and author with Samuel Perry ...

66 MIN