Decisions — durable choices and their rationale

Positioning & pedagogy

Implicit apologetics, never branded as such — the apologetic function shapes the substance (real objections, philosophical rigour, honest treatment) but never the tone or branding. The tone stays “a congregation studying together,” not a fortress under siege.
Series organised by live pressure points, not the systematic-theology syllabus — the traditional order (Theology → Revelation → Anthropology → …) is inward-facing; Aletheia follows the questions real people actually meet in an atheistic world. Each series answers the question the previous one leaves open. Master plan in ROADMAP.md.
Dual authorship maintained — Attie Retief (philosophical/systematic) + Douw Kruger (pastoral/practical). The two-voice design is intentional.

Never use Intelligent Design or creationist framing — ID makes God a competing cause (a demiurge/engineer) and relies on god-of-the-gaps reasoning, which undermines the classical theism Reeks 1 establishes and weakens faith as gaps close. Reformed providence works through natural processes (HC Q27, NGB Art 13). Practically: no Behe/Dembski/irreducible-complexity as a Reformed position; no necessity/chance/design trilemma; frame fine-tuning as deepening the contingency argument, not evidence for a “Designer”; engage evolution honestly (enemy = philosophical naturalism, not the science); treat YEC briefly/respectfully but not as mainstream Reformed. ontwerp is fine ordinarily, risky where it echoes ID “design detection.”
Ground content in the classical tradition (Augustine, Aquinas, the Cappadocians, Bavinck, Kuyper, Warfield), not single modern sources.
Writing craft / humanisation discipline — aim for the refined voice of the Cosmic Wonder book: warm, unhurried, precise, honest about uncertainty. Avoid AI tells: no em-dash overuse, no hollow intensifiers, no reflexive tricolons; read-aloud tested.

Jekyll on GitHub Pages, served at the custom domain aletheia.attieretief.com. Plugin set limited to what GitHub Pages allows.
Bilingual AF/EN throughout — Afrikaans primary, English for the wider audience; parallel lang-af/lang-en blocks and _data/i18n.yml for UI strings.
YouTube embeds for session video (moved off self-hosted video), with an end-overlay and a hard stop enforced at each session’s youtube_end.
ElevenLabs for all Afrikaans TTS — decided after Chatterbox, Fish Audio, multilingual/Dutch models, Synthesia and HeyGen all failed Afrikaans pronunciation or lip-sync. Prefer audio + AI-generated b-roll over talking-head avatars.
crew/ production system is deliberately not autonomous — file-based, in git, human approval required at two gates (script approved, audio approved). Nothing goes live without Attie’s sign-off. Pipeline kept intentionally two-deep — no third script is written while a gate is closed.
ROADMAP.md, crew/, podcast/ and internal drafts are excluded from the Jekyll build (_config.yml exclude) — internal, not for publication.