Back in the (Great) Game: The Revenge of Eurasian Land Powers – By Pepe Escobar

What is left roaming our wilderness of mirrors depends on the mood swings of the Goddess of the Market. No wonder an effect of Eurasia integration will be a death blow to Bretton Woods and “democratic” neoliberalism, says Pepe Escobar.

By Pepe Escobar
Special to Consortium News

Get ready for a major geopolitical chessboard rumble: from now on, every butterfly fluttering its wings and setting off a tornado directly connects to the battle between Eurasia integration and Western sanctions as foreign policy.

It is the paradigm shift of China’s New Silk Roads versus America’s Our Way or the Highway. We used to be under the illusion that history had ended. How did it come to this?

Hop in for some essential time travel. For centuries the Ancient Silk Road, run by mobile nomads, established the competitiveness standard for land-based trade connectivity; a web of trade routes linking Eurasia to the – dominant – Chinese market.

In the early 15^th century, based on the tributary system, China had already established a Maritime Silk Road along the Indian Ocean all the way to the east coast of Africa, led by the legendary Admiral Zheng He. Yet it didn’t take much for imperial Beijing to conclude that China was self-sufficient enough – and that emphasis should be placed on land-based operations.

Deprived of a trade connection via a land corridor between Europe and China, Europeans went all-out for their own maritime silk roads. We are all familiar with the spectacular result: half a millennium of Western dominance.

Until quite recently the latest chapters of this Brave New World were conceptualized by the Mahan, Mackinder and Spykman trio.

The Heartland of the World

Halford Mackinder’s 1904 Heartland Theory – a product of the imperial Russia-Britain New Great Game – codified the supreme Anglo, and then Anglo-American, fear of a new emerging land power able to reconnect Eurasia to the detriment of maritime powers.

Nicholas Spykman’s 1942 Rimland Theory advocated that mobile maritime powers, such as the UK and the U.S., should aim for strategic offshore balancing. The key was to control the maritime edges of Eurasia—that is, Western Europe, the Middle East and East Asia—against any possible Eurasia unifier. When you don’t need to maintain a large Eurasia land-based army, you exercise control by dominating trade routes along the Eurasian periphery.

Even before Mackinder and Spykman, U.S. Navy Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan had come up in the 1890s with his Influence of Sea Power Upon History – whereby the “island” U.S. should establish itself as a seaworthy giant, modeled on the British empire, to maintain a balance of power in Europe and Asia.

It was all about containing the maritime edges of Eurasia.

In fact, we lived in a mix of Heartland and Rimland. In 1952, then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles adopted the concept of an “island chain” (then expanded to three chains) alongside Japan, Australia and the Philippines to encircle and contain both China and the USSR in the Pacific. (Note the Trump administration’s attempt at revival via the Quad–U.S., Japan, Australia and India).

George Kennan, the architect of containing the USSR, was drunk on Spykman, while, in a parallel track, as late as 1988, President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters were still drunk on Mackinder. Referring to U.S. competitors as having a shot at dominating the Eurasian landmass, Reagan gave away the plot: “We fought two world wars to prevent this from occurring,” he said.

Eurasia integration and connectivity is taking on many forms. The China-driven New Silk Roads, also known as Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); the Russia-driven Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU); the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), and myriad other mechanisms, are now leading us to a whole new game.

How delightful that the very concept of Eurasian “connectivity” actually comes from a 2007 World Bank report about competitiveness in global supply chains.

Also delightful is how the late Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski was “inspired” by Mackinder after the fall of the USSR – advocating the partition of a then weak Russia into three separate regions; European, Siberian and Far Eastern.

All Nodes Covered

At the height of the unipolar moment, history did seem to have “ended.” Both the western and eastern peripheries of Eurasia were under tight Western control – in Germany and Japan, the two critical nodes in Europe and East Asia. There was also that extra node in the southern periphery of Eurasia, namely the energy-wealthy Middle East.

Washington had encouraged the development of a multilateral European Union that might eventually rival the U.S. in some tech domains, but most of all would enable the U.S. to contain Russia by proxy.

China was only a delocalized, low-cost manufacture base for the expansion of Western capitalism. Japan was not only for all practical purposes still occupied, but also instrumentalized via the Asian Development Bank (ADB), whose message was: We fund your projects only if you are politically correct.

The primary aim, once again, was to prevent any possible convergence of European and East Asian powers as rivals to the US.

The confluence between communism and the Cold War had been essential to prevent Eurasia integration. Washington configured a sort of benign tributary system – borrowing from imperial China – designed to ensure perpetual unipolarity. It was duly maintained by a formidable military, diplomatic, economic, and covert apparatus, with a star role for theChalmers Johnson-defined Empire of Bases encircling, containing and dominating Eurasia.

Compare this recent idyllic past with Brzezinski’s – and Henry Kissinger’s – worst nightmare: what could be defined today as the “revenge of history”.

That features the Russia-China strategic partnership, from energy to trade:  interpolating Russia-China geo-economics; the concerted drive to bypass the U.S. dollar; the AIIB and the BRICS’s New Development Bank involved in infrastructure financing; the tech upgrade inbuilt in Made in China 2025; the push towards an alternative banking clearance mechanism (a new SWIFT); massive stockpiling of gold reserves; and the expanded politico-economic role of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

As Glenn Diesen formulates in his brilliant book, Russia’s Geo-economic Strategy for a Greater Eurasia, “the foundations of an Eurasian core can create a gravitational pull to draw the rimland towards the centre.”

If the complex, long-term, multi-vector process of Eurasia integration could be resumed by just one formula, it would be something like this: the heartland progressively integrating; the rimlands mired in myriad battlefields and the power of the hegemon irretrievably dissolving. Mahan, Mackinder and Spykman to the rescue? It’s not enough.

Divide and Rule, Revisited

The same applies for the preeminent post-mod Delphic Oracle, also known as Henry Kissinger, simultaneously adorned by hagiography gold and despised as a war criminal.

Before the Trump inauguration, there was much debate in Washington about how Kissinger might engineer – for Trump – a “pivot to Russia” that he had envisioned 45 years ago. This is how I framed the shadow playat the time.

In the end, it’s always about variations of Divide and Rule – as in splitting Russia from China and vice-versa. In theory, Kissinger advised Trump to “rebalance” towards Russia to oppose the irresistible Chinese ascension. It won’t happen, not only because of the strength of the Russia-China strategic partnership, but because across the Beltway, neocons and humanitarian imperialists ganged up to veto it.

Brzezinski’s perpetual Cold War mindset still lords over a fuzzy mix of the Wolfowitz Doctrine and the Clash of Civilizations. The Russophobic Wolfowitz Doctrine – still fully classified – is code for Russia as the perennial top existential threat to the U.S. The Clash, for its part, codifies another variant of Cold War 2.0: East (as in China) vs. West.

Kissinger is trying some rebalancing/hedging himself, noting that the mistake the West (and NATO) is making “is to think that there is a sort of historic evolution that will march across Eurasia – and not to understand that somewhere on that march it will encounter something very different to a Westphalian entity.”

Both Eurasianist Russia and civilization-state China are already on post-Westphalian mode. The redesign goes deep. It includes a key treaty signed in 2001, only a few weeks before 9/11, stressing that both nations renounce any territorial designs on one another’s territory. This happens to concern, crucially, the Primorsky Territory in the Russian Far East along the Amur River, which was ruled by the Ming and Qing empires.

Moreover, Russia and China commit never to do deals with any third party, or allow a third country to use its territory to harm the other’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity.

So much for turning Russia against China. Instead, what will develop 24/7 are variations of U.S. military and economic containment against Russia, China and Iran – the key nodes of Eurasia integration – in a geo-strategic spectrum. It will include intersections of heartland and rimland across Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan and the South China Sea. That will proceed in parallel to the Fed weaponizing the U.S. dollar at will.

Heraclitus Defies Voltaire

Alastair Crooke took a great shot at deconstructing why Western global elites are terrified of the Russian conceptualization of Eurasia. It’s because “they ‘scent’…a stealth reversion to the old, pre-Socratic values: for the Ancients … the very notion of ‘man’, in that way, did not exist. There were only men: Greeks, Romans, barbarians, Syrians, and so on. This stands in obvious opposition to universal, cosmopolitan ‘man’.”

So it’s Heraclitus versus Voltaire – even as “humanism” as we inherited it from the Enlightenment, is de facto over. Whatever is left roaming our wilderness of mirrors depends on the irascible mood swings of the Goddess of the Market. No wonder one of the side effects of progressive Eurasia integration will be not only a death blow to Bretton Woods but also to “democratic” neoliberalism.

What we have now is also a remastered version of sea power versus land powers. Relentless Russophobia is paired with supreme fear of a Russia-Germany rapprochement – as Bismarck wanted, and as Putin and Merkel recently hinted at. The supreme nightmare for the U.S. is in fact a truly Eurasian Beijing-Berlin-Moscow partnership.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has not even begun; according to the official Beijing timetable, we’re still in the planning phase. Implementation starts next year. The horizon is 2039.

This is China playing a long-distance game of go on steroids, incrementally making the best strategic decisions (allowing for margins of error, of course) to render the opponent powerless as he does not even realize he is under attack.

The New Silk Roads were launched by Xi Jinping five years ago, in Astana (the Silk Road Economic Belt) and Jakarta (the Maritime Silk Road). It took Washington almost half a decade to come up with a response. And that amounts to an avalanche of sanctions and tariffs. Not good enough.

Russia for its part was forced to publicly announce a show of mesmerizing weaponryto dissuade the proverbial War Party adventurers probably for good – while heralding Moscow’s role as co-driver of a brand new game.

On sprawling, superimposed levels, the Russia-China partnership is on a roll; recent examples include summits in Singapore, Astana and St. Petersburg; the SCO summit in Qingdao; and the BRICS Plus summit.

Were the European peninsula of Asia to fully integrate before mid-century – via high-speed rail, fiber optics, pipelines – into the heart of massive, sprawling Eurasia, it’s game over. No wonder Exceptionalistan elites are starting to get the feeling of a silk rope drawn ever so softly, squeezing their gentle throats.

Pepe Escobar is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is 2030. Follow him on Facebook.

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/29/back-in-the-great-game-the-revenge-of-eurasian-land-powers/

Geniuses of The Left and the Glory of Cars - By Thomas Luongo

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is most likely going to jail.  She wasn’t Steve Jobs with a vagina, she was a fraud.

George Soros is not a “billionaire philanthropist” anymore than Hillary Clinton is the “most qualified person to ever run for President.”  He’s a cross between a virus and a vulture, first indiscriminately killing whole colonies of prey and looting their corpses long after they are dead.

Mark Zuckerberg is not the kid who brought the world together.  He’s just a creepy stalker with powerful friends.

Elon Musk isn’t “the smartest guy in the room”.  He’s a huckster.  A talented huckster, for sure.  But, the lies of the huckster always catch up with them, like right now.

All of these people are the New Geniuses championed relentlessly by the Left. They are the media darlings of the past decade presented to us as the new faces of capitalism while pulling the strings of the political system to prove to us there is a better way forward for humanity.

But, there isn’t.  This con job of Soros’ “open society” is nothing more than a front for the same Utopian Trotskyism that destroyed Russia a century ago.  They are the same tired, pampered control freaks, the forces of centralization I call The Davos Crowd, set upon us to steal our wealth and and limit our choices.

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Musk, in particular, is the worst of the three innovators listed above.  Why?  Because he’s trying to destroy the car.

And the car is the most important invention of the 20th century.  It gave us freedom of movement in ways our ancestors could only dream about.

Freedom of movement enhances trade and resource collection/distribution by orders of magnitude.  It gave us on-demand mechanical advantage not capable with block and tackle or teams of horses.

And Musk wants to tie the car to the centralized, massively inefficient electrical grid, owned and operated around the world by the State.  He wants to chuck a century of perfecting the internal combustion engine be it powered by gasoline or diesel.

But, if he really wanted to free the masses from the tyranny of oil he wouldn’t have built Tesla the way he has.

The Tesla isn’t purpose-built to revolutionize travel, it was purpose-built to serve the Myth of Man-Made Global Warming.  It’s the Toyota Prius Americanized — fattened up to be a luxury sedan with the implicit message that you can have your cake and eat it too.

You can have a car that is powerful, good-looking, luxurious and socially-conscious.

It may be all of those things.  But, the Model S is something more sinister than that.  It is a con job because it trades the reliability of access to power and storage of said power for a dream no one should have been having in the first place.

It is a sad reflection on a world awash in cheap credit and malinvested capital.  Tesla has never produced one car at a price point that doesn’t cost the company thousands of dollars per item.

And therefore its promise is a lie, as it not only eats the cake it also eats your neighbor’s cake as well.

And now the narrative is all about the Model 3 being the new Volkswagen, the people’s car.  To bring our higher community spirit to a consumer-level package.  Because that’s the society this world of bank-owned corporatocracy has created, one where intentions  are more valuable than actually producing things people use.

This is in stark contrast to the original Volkswagen, which truly was a revolutionary product.  In the same way that the original Mustang was the American car perfected for the middle class of the mid-1960’s.

The point of electric cars and, worse, self-driving cars is too make travel unreliable and further ensure that in times of societal crisis all the State would have to do to stop us from getting around is shut down the grid.

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Compared to electricity, gasoline production is massively decentralized.  You can’t store electricity reliably.  It’s an on-demand product no matter what the form.

And reliable electricity is the one thing that separates the first world from the third.

Without it a modern economy withers.

And that’s exactly what the Geniuses of the Left have planned for us, a homogeneous world of quiet desperation and tyranny of isolation sold to us as ‘shared community responsibility.’

It’s a good thing none of it is sustainable.

So, when watching this livestream today forgive the digressions into geeking out about cars and understand that this is why Tesla and the Geniuses of the Left are all but finished.  As always NFSW rules apply.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/08/thomas-luongo/geniuses-of-the-left-and-the-glory-of-cars/

Vox Popoli: And so it begins - (The decline of the United States Marine Corps )

And so it begins

The decline of the United States Marine Corps is already in full effect:

The Basic School for Marine Officers is reeling from a cheating scandal that involved six second lieutenants accused of wrongfully obtaining and sharing key grid points for the night land navigation course.

The officers were accused of sharing the grid points via text messages ­before the test and later relying on them to find hidden boxes stashed across the wooded night land ­navigation course in Quantico, Virginia, ­according to interviews with Marine Corps officials and a copy of the command investigation obtained by Marine Corps Times.

The Marine Corps considers that cheating because the students were able to complete the course without demonstrating the key skills the course aims to evaluate: conducting proper land navigation.

One guess as to why.

One of the other alleged cheaters, a female second lieutenant, with the assumed name Lt. Delta, confided in the other student she “could pass Final Night Land Navigation by plotting the boxes beforehand,” according to the command investigation. The female lieutenant spoke to Marine Corps Times on condition of anonymity.

But surely these fine Marine officers will take full responsibility for their actions and resign their commissions, right?

One of the two female officers ensnared in the ­cheating scandal, Lt. Delta, accused other TBS officers of gender discrimination during the investigation.... Before the entire land navigation situation ­happened, Lt. Delta had filed a restricted sexual ­assault allegation, in November 2017. She was ­assigned a uniformed victims advocate, another Marine who is trained and assigned to provide support to sexual assault victims. 

Of course she did. But not to worry. Since we are told that diversity makes everything stronger, I have no doubt that its manifold blessings will more than make up for officers who lack integrity, won't take responsibility, and can't read a map.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/08/and-so-it-begins.html

Some Pastors and Teachers: A Manifesto - written by Michael Pohlman

The Tortoise wins.

I remember hearing Aesop’s famous fable The Hare & the Tortoise as a little boy and thinking, “I’d still like to be the hare. After all, the tortoise may win, but who wants to be a tortoise?”

Many years later I’ve reconsidered, especially when it comes to pastoral ministry. If there ever was a vocation wherein “the race is not to the swift,” it’s the pastorate. A faithful shepherd will pace himself for the long haul given the nature of the work. Pastors are not pounding out “products,” but doing heart work. And heart work can be messy, unpredictable, and slow to change.

When I was a child our family took annual trips from our Southern California home to the northwest corner of Iowa to visit my grandparents, aunt and uncle, and cousins. I come from a family of German immigrants who came to Iowa for its rich farmland. I recall the first time my grandfather pointed out the living room window of their home (a converted school house overlooking farms as far as the eye could see) as he explained to me the way farmers rotated out the crops each year: corn, soybeans, corn, soybeans. This, I learned, was good for the soil. With other stories my grandfather would tell of how farmers needed great effort and patience as they waited for the crops to come in. To see the fruits of their labor farmers needed time: time to prepare the soil, time to plant, time to water and, finally, time to bring in the harvest. Being a farmer is not work for those wanting instant gratification. The parallels to the pastorate are many. Much like the farmer, pastoral ministry demands patient toil.

This, of course, is not the world we live in. We live in the age of instant. We want our WiFi to fly, our coffee ready, our music streaming, our shopping at the speed of Prime, and our social media and news feeds constantly refreshed. As Cal Newport helpfully observes, our age mitigates against “deep work.” ¹Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Grand Central Publishing, 2016).  And pastoral ministry is the ultimate deep work. In 2009 David Gordon concluded that Johnny Can’t Preach in large part because Johnny can’t read and write. ²T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers (P&R, 2009).  The modern day preacher seems increasingly unable to do the deep work required given how media have shaped the messenger. Gordon was prophetic writing before smart phones, Twitter, and texting became ubiquitous in the culture making his thesis still more tenable. In the last decade there’s been a steady stream of scholarship focused on the impact of digital media on the mind. And not only on our minds, but our humanity itself may be at stake. The literature is ominous regarding the effects of our technological age. ³See, for example, Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (Penguin Press, 2017); Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: Why the Internet is Doing to Our Brians (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011); Donna Freitas, The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost (Oxford, 2017); Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011) and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Books, 2016); Jean Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood–and What That Means for the Rest of Us). Each of these scholars, of course, is building on the work of earlier philosophers and social scientists such as Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Vintage Books, 1964); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Signet Books, 1964); and Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin Books, 1985) and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Vintage Books, 1993).

At Some Pastors and Teachers we want to go counter to today’s frenetic pace. Our digital world feels frenzied because, well, it is. There is a hyperactivity to our time that works against pastoral ministry. What Nicholas Carr observes about the impact of the Internet on his life and thought can be applied to pastors today:

The boons [of the Internet] are real. But they come at a price. As McLuhan suggested, media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. ⁴Carr, The Shallows, 6-7.

Pastoral work is not like riding a Jet Ski — zipping along the surface water of God’s Word and people’s hearts. Pastors are “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Corinthians 4:1) laboring for people’s “progress and joy in the faith” (Philippians 1:25). This is not work done in the shallows.

This is the vital lesson the apostles learned early on in the church. In Acts 6 we see the temptation for the church’s leadership to be pulled away from the deep work required of an under-shepherd. Rather than be deterred from matters of first importance, the leadership provided for another way to satisfy a very real need. After all, widows being neglected in the daily distribution of food is no small thing. But their need couldn’t be met at the expense of prayer and the ministry of Word:

Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” ⁵Acts 6:1-4

The word translated ‘devote’ means “to attend to, devote oneself to” with regularity and steadfastness. ⁶William Mounce, Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, 180. Pastors must cultivate sustained, concentrated focus on the ministries of Word and prayer. And we need to be ruthless in keeping at bay distractions from this primary work. The apostle Paul trained his young apprentice Timothy in this understanding of the pastorate when he reminded him of what every pastor should be devoted to:

Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress. Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers. ⁷1 Timothy 4:13-16

Note the verbs in this passage: devote, practice, immerse, keep a close watch, persist. To be sure, the current state of evangelicalism is not amenable to these disciplines. But this is no excuse for the pastor to not practice them.

Given this, we’re creating a platform for pastors that seeks to slow things down. We want to cultivate thoughtfulness and reflection about things of first importance to a pastor: things like theology, ecclesiology, preaching, apologetics, and counseling. We’ll do this through a publishing cycle that allows for time to absorb thoughtful writing about topics relevant to pastors. Rather than an avalanche of content burying pastors in “right now,” our goal is to create a space of “less-is-more” content that is worthy of sustained concentration for the sake of wise application. Our editorial approach will not exacerbate attention deficits, but seek to cultivate attention surpluses.

Some years ago I worked for a major media company doing editorial work. My boss had a phrase he loved to use when it came to the Internet: daily addiction. The idea was to have so much new, fresh content on a daily basis that people felt compelled to traffic our websites everyday, throughout the day. And, believe me, this can work. Adam Alter is right. ⁸Alter, Irresistible. But by feeding the frenzy we were (unintentionally) undermining people’s ability to think beyond the surface of any given issue because before you knew it, we were on to the next thing.

I recall an acquaintance of mine during my undergraduate years at the University of Washington. Brad and I attended the same campus ministry. Our small group of guys was asked a question by one of the leaders about how we deal with the hectic nature of our lives, how we carved out time (if we did at all) for thoughtful reflection on God and the Bible. What Brad said has stuck with me all these years. He said, “I walk slowly.” Rather than move quickly from one class to the next or from one meeting to another, Brad said, “I intentionally slow down my pace.” Whether Brad was on time for things is beside the point. His effort to slow things down for the sake of contemplation seemed right in 1994 and seems all-the-more important in 2018. ⁹Cf., Mumford & Sons’ “Lovers’ Eyes” from their 2012 album Babel and Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).

Some Pastors and Teachers is designed to help you “walk slow.” We dare to use the Internet in a way most people think impossible, if they think about it at all. We are moving contra frenzy. How will we do this?

Some Pastors and Teachers is, in a sense, a manifestation of Neil Postman’s “Loving Resistance Fighter.” ¹⁰Technopoly, 181-200. In this resistance we demand that the Internet serve us in our calling as pastors and teachers. We are not modern day Luddites longing for a past “golden age” before the Industrial Revolution gave birth to our wired world. That said, we firmly believe the Internet was made for man not man for the Internet. And this conviction brings with it several unique editorial characteristics that will be evident on our website, our podcast, and during the colloquia we host.

SOMEPASTORSANDTEACHERS.COM 

At our website we are establishing a publishing cycle that drops less, not more, content in a week. This is an intentional effort to emphasize quality over quantity. Also, you will find at the site, more often than not, articles and essays not blog posts. And we love footnotes. The reason for this is simple and profound: pastors are called to deal with the deep things of God and the human heart. The issues relevant to pastors can’t be worked through in a tweet or two, or a blog post of five or seven bullet points. ¹¹On this point see Janet Lowen, “It’s Never as Easy as One, Two, Three.”

Another way we plan to “walk slow” on our website is to champion the weekly columnist. I remember my senior year in college waiting in anticipation for Friday morning to arrive. This was the day one of my favorite columns in our school newspaper landed. I couldn’t wait to read this weekly opinion piece for its thoughtfulness and provocation. While I didn’t always agree with the author, his columns almost always inspired me to think deeply. In a time when many people think they have something valuable to say every day throughout the day, at Some Pastors and Teachers we aren’t convinced of this. But we do believe good thinkers can produce thoughtful columns on a weekly basis. Our plan is to give you weekly columnists you can’t wait to read given the quality of their prose and ideas. We are bringing to the site true writers.

I am also increasingly drawn to websites that display a minimalist aesthetic for the sake of thoughtfulness. Too many websites have too much “noise.” The clutter crowds out contemplation. These websites are so overloaded with headlines and graphics and videos — things popping up and talking when not asked — that they turn us into zombies clicking unconsciously on the first thing that gets in our way. When you come to our site we want you to enter a “clean” space where your mind is not bombarded with chaos but quieted with order. Navigation will be simple and the content displayed in a way that is inviting rather than repelling. We actually think our site is a place you’ll want to visit and stay a while because it is a refuge in a world ruled by the tyranny of the urgent.

With the democratization of knowledge in the digital age, like Tom Nichols, we want to push back against the death of expertise. ¹²Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters (Oxford University Press, 2017). In 2007 Andrew Keen observed that the Internet brought with it the “cult of the amateur.” ¹³Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values (DoubleDay, 2007). While the death of expertise and the cult of the amateur is bad for our democracy, it’s disastrous for the church. Theology matters and God has given to the church “some pastors and teachers” to be guardians and purveyors of orthodoxy. ¹⁴Cf., Ephesians 4:11-14  We believe formal theological education is good and needed and should be valued in the church. Therefore we will solicit writers who have evident expertise in the area they’re writing about. Not potential expertise, but established knowledge and wisdom. This puts a welcome burden on our editors to bring writers into our fold who model this editorial conviction: expert prose in the service of pastors for the good of the churches they serve.

PODCAST

Our weekly podcast is designed to accomplish many of the same goals as our website. What we do in print we want to do with audio. The episodes will feature topics and guests that pastors need to consider if we would be faithful in our work. The main goal will not be to entertain but to inform and inspire. Each program will be relevant without being a slave to relevance as we, not the world, seek to set the agenda for the pastor. In other words, what is most important or relevant isn’t always what’s happening today. The podcast will not be news driven, but ecclesiologically driven even as we take up current events from time-to-time.

Perhaps the one adjective that comes to mind more than any other to describe our podcast is serious. We are serious about God, the Bible, the gospel, the pastorate, and the church. Of course, we hope our seriousness is communicated with an attractive tone and, at times, good humor. But our podcast will always be more D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones than The Babylon Bee.

COLLOQUIUM 

During my residency work for my PhD I always looked forward to Wednesdays at 1:30 p.m. This is when our weekly colloquium gathered. Assembled in the room was the entire church history faculty and my peers in the program. With nervous excitement I loved how a given faculty member would pursue us on the reading for the week. Those discussions were both humbling and exhilarating. I learned much.

Part of why I learned so much was the close proximity I had to the professors and my peers. We actually discussed, debated, and argued over deeply significant issues. We looked each other in the eyes, studied body language, and picked up on nuances of tone that might be missed in a larger gathering. And unlike the social media world we live in today, civility was nurtured. We were not unknown emojis opining, but real people forced to practice neighbor love in person. It’s much harder to treat someone poorly in person than it is in the virtual world. ¹⁵See, for example, “Are We All ‘Harmless Torturers’ Now?” (The New York Times, August 9, 2018).

In smaller gatherings you’re more accountable for what you say. This is a good thing because it forces you to think before you talk and to measure your words in a way you might not otherwise. Everyone is a genius in the crowd. But when you have to actually test your thesis in a closer community of people who will critique your content, this makes your work better.

Our colloquia will be annual events purposefully smaller than the large conferences in evangelicalism today. We want to give attendees close proximity to the keynote speaker as well as their peers for the sake of going deeper in knowledge and application. We want to use these events to resource fewer people (than the major conferences) for the sake of making stronger impacts on the many. We see a model for this in Jesus’ earthly ministry with his focus on the twelve and the three.

FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS

Pastors are “stewards of the mysteries of God” and called to “care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.” ¹⁶See, 1 Corinthians 4:1 and Acts 20:28. Pastoral ministry is the ultimate deep work. This is why Some Pastors and Teachers exists: to help equip pastors to better care for the churches they serve.

We are aware that the world (and much of evangelicalism) doesn’t prize our approach. It may seem too slow or too serious or not flashy enough. After all, the world doesn’t revere turtles. But we’re hoping to enlist thousands of turtles to take up the cause of Some Pastors and Teachers.

Because the Tortoise wins.

https://somepastorsandteachers.com/2018/08/some-pastors-and-teachers-a-manifesto/