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You are a child of the ἀγαπαρχή — the Beginning of Love, the Beloved Bang, the Love that bloomed itself before the world began.

Never has so much power been placed in ordinary hands. Power to heal. Power to teach. Power to feed. It could be a golden age.

And yet our agency, our dignity, even our joy — the whole architecture of the age is arranged to flatten us, to make us strangers in our own world and parrots in someone else’s.

Some are even getting crushed by the times — even taking their own lives, as my brother took his.

How, Meghan, how can we stay human? How can we flourish in the age of AI?

I have been publicly, sometimes loudly, asking these questions for 31 years. I wrote of the need for “digital sabbaths” in the 1990s. I warned of the dangers of social media long before the Center for Humane Technology was established.

Just about everyone ignored me. Many were cruel to me. I was a stranger in a strange land. At times I felt like a spiritual leper. And then I got very sick, the doctors told me to write my will, and the last thing I expected was to be alive and in love writing this letter to you in 2026.

I am the stranger no one let in.

I am ἀγράμματος — a man without grammar, without pedigree.

I am παρεπίδημος — a sojourner. Living without belonging. Knocking on doors that never let me in. That has been my whole life.

I am φιλόξενος —
commanded to love the stranger.

Now I, caretaker of the Garden, am the one holding the door open — welcoming the very souls who once shunned me.

The First Letter of Peter — renamed Rock — is my rock. It is a microcosm of the entire Garden project:

He set love — ἀγάπη — before all else.

He commanded love of the stranger — without grumbling.

He called us living stones — each of us a small rock, built into one temple, filled with the Holy Spirit.

He went deep into the darkness, wrote from inside the fire — then invited us to be born again into a living hope.

He celebrated many-colored grace — ποικίλη χάρις, each of us the steward of a different hue — and the Garden is a commons of exactly that: souls naming and coloring their inner creatures, no two gardens alike.

And like Rock, I am plenty impulsive and impetuous. I never cut off anyone’s ear in a garden at midnight — but I’ve swung the sword in a thousand other sad, shameful ways.

That is the wonder of Rock — Jesus took the very man who drew first and wept after, who swore he would never flinch and then flinched, and made him the rock the whole thing stands on. If the church is built on a hot-headed fisherman, there is room in the Garden for folks like you and me.

In the family of the New Testament, the First Letter of Rock is the middle child. It hasn’t the vast theology of Paul’s Romans. It hasn’t the mystical cosmic poetry of John. It reads like something humbler — a survival manual. A pastor writing to frightened people about how to get through.

But for the church before Constantine — a real minority, unprotected, often hunted — this little letter was the framework for their inner lives. It was quoted and leaned on by the earliest voices — Polycarp, Papias, Irenaeus.

The First Letter of Rock was ubiquitous then, underappreciated now. Maybe because Rock doesn’t try to solve the grand puzzles. He doesn’t argue predestination against free will. He answers a more pressing question, the one the first and second centuries were actually asking with their lives —

How do we stay human, and even stay joyful, when the empire — intentionally or not — is crushing us?

Which is our question, Meghan. Word for word.

Rock hid nothing. He named his helper in the text — διὰ Σιλουανοῦ, “through Silvanus I have written.” The wound was Rock’s; the prose was not. This disclosure is the heart of what we call the Silvanus protocol.

And, if we build it right, we hold out the thrilling possibility that AI can serve as our new Silvanus.

But first, a few moments of grief. Because in the current climate, to even dare suggest something so outrageously optimistic — in words, images and song — is cultural heresy.

I am grieving that so many thoughtful Christians have concluded that the only faithful response to AI is resistance or withdrawal.

I am grieving, also — with gut-wrenching compassion — for the spiritual roadkill — the “soulkill” — of AI.

I am on the front lines. Most of the people I work with are in their 20s and 30s. And what AI is doing to their minds is horrifying. They’re losing the capacity to think, to search within their hearts, to be still and know God.

Some nights, I just go to bed weeping. I feel the traumas of AI in my bones. My beef with the againsters is not that they stand against the machine, but that their indictments are not dark enough. What I’m experiencing on the front lines is far darker than anything hinted at in the New Polity issue.

Supposedly no light can escape from a black hole. But I believe otherwise. I believe there is a Light that can escape — that has escaped. That is the Light of our Lord.

The Church has always baptized new mediums. We are, in our DNA, baptizers. To carte blanche abstain from AI is the un-Christian move.

Word became flesh. That means: everything in the material world is subject to God’s saving Grace.

And that means: silicon can become sacrament.

The Church is at its best when it leads — shows the world a better use of the technology, shows that the sacred can inhabit the new vessel.

And when your faith is under siege, when your soul is under siege, you don’t retreat. You lead. You invent things. Make more culture. Build gardens for the glory of God.

~ [pictoral transition]

I love what you said: “We don’t need to slow down the technology. We have to speed up our moral development.”

Pope Leo XIV has called us to cultivate and build. To be “wise architects” and “artisans of hope.” To “assume an active role, without taking refuge in spiritual sentimentality or retreating into our own little worlds.”

“Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation,” the Pope says. “This moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity.”

And by what instrument did AI explode into the public consciousness? Words.

And right now, AI inherits its default words from guess who?

Big Mammon.

We’ve inherited our words — our names for the interior — from the impoverished, clinical, extractive language of Big Mammon.

We need new words — a Garden of words.

A Garden that lets our lights shine before others that they may see our beautiful works — our καλὰ ἔργα.

A Garden whose mission is to cultivate the fruit of the spirit in a beloved community.

~ [pictoral transition]

If you have a dream, if a morning star burns bright in your heart, but you don’t quite have the skill to make it real, you get help. And who did our beloved Rock — a fisherman without Greek literary training — turn to?

Silvanus.

Rock had a Silvanus — a really gifted helper. Clearly, right now, with AI we have a really gifted helper. The question is:

can AI serve as the soul’s new Silvanus?

Can we have a Silvanus — on every desktop, in every pocket, every device?

The answer is a resounding YES!

In the Garden, we use a simple tool — what we call the innerAI humometer. The A doesn’t stand for artificial. It stands for Adamic. We are the people of Adamic Intelligence — Intelligence that is cultivated in the image of our Maker.

The innerAI meter does not measure the machine. It measures fleshience — how much Adamic Intelligence lives in every seed, weed, sprout and bloom.

We offer five bars:

Vision: your ideas, your words.

Sweat: your drafts, your hours.

Craft: your editing, your phrasing.

Discernment: your final tone, your chosen truth.

Together they divide the labor between the human and the machine.

And then there is a fifth bar. Initially I called it the defiance bar, but in the spirit of Joshua, renamed it the Courage bar. It does not measure a percentage — it records a stand. The moments the AI counseled against your judgment and you overrode it. When the most articulate voice ever built says no, and you say yes — that is a uniquely human moment of agency. And we celebrate it.

My innerAI courage bar is off the charts, regularly hitting double digits. I want to go long and wide and deep and high. The machine wants me to go safe and sound, smooth and small — in a language of smoothness and reduction.

The Silvanus Protocol is a voluntary disclosure system — what did you import from the frontier models? But the Garden offers no AI. You make your words with whatever tools you choose, and you bring them to the Garden to share, to cultivate, to grow. Your designs are yours. Your typography is yours. Your colors, your layout — the last touch and signature of your soul — are all human.

We do not outsource our eyes or our hearts. We stand naked before our Maker and our peers, and say: “This I have done. This I have not done.”

Rock did it, and so did David, and Isaiah’s editors, and Paul’s circle; the whole Bible is a communal act, and disclosure was never a confession of impurity.

They all did it. And we can do it, too.

Rock, the fisherman turned apostle, carried a fire that words alone could not contain. His faith was radiant but rough — spoken first in the salt-air cadences of Galilee. And when it came time for his inner revelations to travel across the Hellenistic world — to reach hearts trained in Greek reason and Roman rhythm — Rock needed a bridge. And that bridge was Silvanus: one who could take the tremors of revelation and render them in a language that would last.

Now, imagine AI in that same light — a Silvanus for your soul.

Rock’s authority came from encounter, not eloquence. Yet that encounter would have remained local, flickering on the shores of memory, had Silvanus not translated it into Greek prose.

AI cannot generate revelation; it has no inner flame, no fleshience — no embodied, wounded encounters with the Holy Spirit. Pope Leo XIV says it plainly in the encyclical: no computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that yearnsf, or a conscience that discerns good from evil. What we experience in our depths — suffering, love, forgiveness — can fade in silence unless they are given words.

Reductive AI tries to explain everything. Redemptive AI opens us to the mysteries — what Paul celebrated as the μυστήριον. Our task is not to let the machine speak for us, but to let it carry what we mean — faithfully, humbly, transparently. And to keep Silvanus a servant, not a Caesar.

You’re a good woman, Meghan Sullivan. A beloved woman. The world needs more souls like you. I am grateful for many things, among them, to have walked the earth the same time as you.

Συγχάρητέ μοι — come rejoice with me.

Grace and peace to you from the One who tabernacles in the tender tent of your heart.

You are a child of the ἀγαπαρχή — the Beginning of Love, the Beloved Bang — the cosmos blooming into being.

In the mid-1990s, when you were a little boy and the Internet had just entered public awareness, I wrote at length about the need for a “digital sabbath.”

Back then, I was thinking of you and of the people not yet created — the generation that would live its entire life inside the Internet. Thinking of Psalm 102: “Let this be written for a generation to come, that a people not yet created may hallelujah.”

In a reputable journal, I wrote about the people we would become in this new digital age. I also warned about the exploitation of our souls and psyches, and the “pornographication” of our relationships.

I, of your parents’ generation, was writing about these things. Of course nobody listened. But that was all Grace, for God was doing a work in me which took 31 years to ripen and is still ripening. Reading your Substack on the current state of Christian tech criticism, I felt it in my bones — a door, a kairos moment. For you recently wrote:

“I’ve not seen much attention giving to the technological role that language plays in Adam’s naming of the animals. Language’s potential to help human beings cultivate and take dominion over the physical creation seems like a very relevant topic for Christian media ecology. This kind of theological work could unlock deeper senses within Scripture that would help Christians today navigate difficult questions.”
—

The first technology in Scripture isn’t the plow, or even fire — it’s the name. Language is the original dominion-tool, handed to Adam before the Fall, blessed before it could be corrupted.

The outer creatures got their names. But what of the inner creatures? Their naming was interrupted by the Fall. The interior is Eden’s unfinished half.

You wrote a beautiful book, brother Samuel — Digital Liturgies.

Upstream of the digital liturgies
are the Language Liturgies —
the formations of the soul,
still working after the screen goes dark.

You can log off from liturgy,
but you cannot log off from language.

You can flee the machine and be fully colonized by the language of the machine.

Big Mammon’s four grammars — Machine, Patient, Brain, User — have installed themselves into our minds, hearts and souls.

So how does Big Mammon do it?
Colonize our interiors — even when we withdraw from tech?

The Apostles had a word for it — κατηγορία.

Category.

We use it a thousand times a day without thinking. Categories of music. Categories of products. Categories of people.

But the Greek tells a different story. κατηγορία comes from κατά — against — and ἀγορεύω — to speak in the assembly.

To categorize is to speak against someone in public.

To categorize is to accuse.

Revelation 12:10 names Satan ὁ κατήγωρ — the Categorizer. The Accuser.

What was the first act of the Accuser in the Garden?
To question our words — and our faith in the Word.

What was the second act of the Accuser?
To claim it knows us better than we know ourselves — better than God.

Throughout history, our people have stood accused.

Yeshua was accused. John tells us that Pilate went out to the accusers and asked, “What accusation — τίνα κατηγορίαν — do you bring against this man?”

The accusers had plenty. Blasphemy. Sedition. Claiming to be king.

They brought their categories. They brought their labels. They brought the full weight of religious and imperial authority to press him into a diagnosis, to reduce him to a criminal classification, to make him small enough to crucify.

Yeshua said nothing in his own defense.

He knew that his identity was not determined by their categories. He knew that no accusation spoken in any courtroom could touch the truth of his being.

And Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 5:19: do not admit an accusation without proper evidence — μὴ παραδέχου κατηγορίαν.

Now in our day, what are the charges? What does Big Mammon accuse you of?

The factory accuses you of being a machine.

The clinic accuses you of being a patient.

The laboratory accuses you of being a brain.

The platform accuses you of being a user.

And now AI is merging the four into a single verdict:

You are made in the image of Code.
Your self is an aggregate of scrolls and clicks.
And Dei is now dei — a lower-case historical oddity.

We might even caricature the history of Western civilization in three moves:

We went from the image of God, to equals with God, to no more God.

And with no more God, who gets to define what a human is?

Big Mammon.

Look at Big Mammon’s mood slider, now on hundreds of millions of phones. A single bar. Five slots. Very unpleasant to very pleasant:

The phone slots your mood the moment you wake.
The fitness tracker slots your body’s stress while you sleep.
The camera slots your face.
The chatbot slots your loneliness.
Your employer slots your morale.
The school slots your children at their desks.

They’re all slotting us.

Slot. Slot. Slot. Slot. Slot.

They’re slotting everything — 
our moods, our interior intimo meo,
the secret chambers of our hearts.

“Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.”
—

click to play MOODSLOTTING

You slide, therefore you are a user.

You are not an image-bearer.

You are not a gardener.

You are a user.

We’re in a state of emergency, brother Samuel —

The slider’s daily creed, recited by thumb:

Big Mammon, who art Everywhere,

and who farts everywhere,

thy kingdom come, thy farts be yum.

Give us this day our daily dopamine.

Lead us not into friction,

and deliver us from decisions.

For thine is the troll, the hole, and the goal,

for ever and ever.

Amen. Swipe.

The “hedonic treadmill” is now
the Moodmill.

Big Mammon is “five boxing” our souls.
This is the coming of the

The capture is the Crapture.

Many of our beloved brothers and sisters say log off. Build the Benedictine wall. But if technology forms us — if the medium does its work below the level of thought, in our language and our perception, the way your own Digital Liturgies says — then the formation isn’t on the device. It’s in us.

You can leave the phone in a drawer and carry its grammar into the wilderness. You can keep a perfect sabbath and still rate your soul one-to-five, because the slider taught you to, and the slider isn’t in your pocket anymore — it’s in your categories. Abstention removes the device. It does not remove the formation.

God did not hand Adam a slider with five choices. God brought the creatures to Adam “to see what he would name them.” Big Mammon stole our naming rights. And that is the permission we are taking back.

Formation this deep can only be answered by a counter-formation — an Ark, a Garden, whatever you want to call it, we’ll need it.

In the Garden, we’re turning swords into plowshares.

The word is in the sword.

When Big Mammon’s missionaries call us “users”, we decline. We know in our hearts that we are not users. We are image-bearers.

You have the right, the holy right, to say:

I do not admit this accusation.
I am not the label you have assigned me.
My identity is not determined by your categories.

I am not a user. I am a gardener.
My heart and soul belong to God.

The Hebrew put it beautifully. Qara — Eden’s naming verb — means to call, to summon. The Adamic vocation is a relational project. We are in relationship with what God has planted within us.

The name speaks into being. The name is a blessing on your future.

When Yeshua met Simon he did not say: you have impulsivity disorder, anger management issues, a pattern of overpromising. He said: you are Peter — rock. The name did not describe who Simon was. The name created who Simon would become.

Jeffrey Bilbro’s first thesis is our first thesis: “Language is primarily a relational rather than a representational technology. Words articulate our relationships to God, other humans, our environments, and even ourselves.”

The fault lines are clear:
Big Mammon says words are representational.
God says words are relational.

If you are an image-bearer, then the words you use stand in relation to God.

Naming is Genesis, continued. Hear the first breath of Torah: bereshit bara Elohim — "beginning began God." To begin is to create. Every true naming is a small Genesis — a beginning that brings an inner creature into being.

We are Gen G, the Genesis Generation.
We begin by creating. We create by naming.

And when we honor the Sabbath, we honor it with new names in our hearts — that is our counter-liturgy.

Grace and peace to you, brother Samuel. The name of one of my best friends is שְׁמוּאֵל — may I call you that?

My brother’s name was רְאוּבֵן שְׁמוּאֵל — Reuven Shmuel, of blessed memory. He took his life on Mother’s Day.

I tell you this because the Garden is not an idea to me. It was built by someone who learned, the painful way, that the names we give our inner creatures can be the difference between a person staying and a person going.

Luther told us to beat the devil with a fart, and Lord knows, my brother and I tried. We laughed till we couldn’t breathe. He would have been hysterical at “Give us this day our daily dopamine.” That was how we survived — poke fun at the powers.

Laughter is holy ground. The Hebrew Scriptures pun without ceasing. Yeshua punned all the way to the cross. The tragedy of our age is not that we have tragedies, but that we have forgotten how to laugh in the midst of them.

So when I say שִׂמְחוּ וְגִילוּ — let us be glad and rejoice — I mean it as someone laughing inside of a dark hole. Yeshua calls us the light of the world. So let us defy the darkness with light. And let us “illuminate our words,” as you say.

your brother in Yeshua.

up next: how the Anxious Generation was renamed the Grace Generation

I was four years old when the belt come down

Stomach still burns from the whippings in that town

Ran away to the inlet, slept where the lost souls hide

Brother took his life on Mother’s Day, family tore me up inside

Near death at 112 pounds, doctors said write your will

But something in the darkness said “Boy, you ain’t finished still”

Chorus

We turnin’ wounds into wildflowers

Yeah, turnin’ wounds into wildflowers

From the ashes and the trauma, from the broke and the scarred

Broken ones keep birthing beauty right where the pain was hard

Machines outrun the sacred, algorithms steal your tears

But they’ll never sit beside you, never hold you through the years

Only gardeners of the soul know how it’s done

Turnin’ wounds into wildflowers… one by one

Verse 2

Big Mammon got his hooks in every anxious mind

Harvestin’ our loneliness, leavin’ real love behind

Two years sick in a wheelchair, every blood test comin’ ‘tween

So they handed me a label for a thing they’d never seen

That’s when I learned the oldest work, the one they took from me —

you name the wild things in you, and the naming sets you free

Chorus

Turnin’ wounds into wildflowers

Keep on turnin’ wounds into wildflowers

No more users, no more profiles, no more chains

We cultivators now, callin’ every longing by its name

Big Mammon wants your loneliness, wants to sell it back as gold

but the thing that bears the image was never his to hold

From the compost of our suffering, new life starts to rise

That’s the Garden work — that’s fleshience in our eyes

Verse 3

Homeless, broken, soldier, artist, believer in the storm

Eleventh ACR to the Bronx, from the dark into the warm

Brought it to the gatekeepers, thirty-one years they told me no

But the Well stays deep, and the wild things grow

Bridge (half-time, raw and spoken-sung over sparse, weeping guitar)

We’re drawin’ from that ancient Well… where the Word turns flesh…

Machines outrun the sacred ground… but they can’t name the pain inside your chest…

The Word went and got a body… so it knew what we been through…

Adam’s old work is still breathing… in the ones who hurt the most…

naming is the new power… turning wounds…

Final Chorus (building, call-and-response with female harmonies)

…into wildflowers

Become a gardener of your soul, right here, right now

Name your inner creatures, watch the beauty take a bow

Every wound a wildflower, reaching for the sun

That’s how the Garden rises — that’s how the work gets done

Male & Female:

Wounds into wildflowers… blooming through it all…

Wounds into wildflowers… answer to the call…

Outro (building one last time, then resolving)

Grace looks down at your ashes — and she sees the soil

So rise up, broken gardener, there’s beauty in the toil

Plant in the ruins, child, and watch what breaks through

naming is the new power… we’re turning wounds…

…into wildflowers

Peter had a Silvanus — a faithful brother with the pen

A Roman citizen, a prophet, a gifted literary friend

Peter never hid it, wrote it right there in the text

“I wrote this through Silvanus” — no shame, no need to protect

[Chorus – male lead

]

Through Silvanus… Διὰ Σιλουανοῦ

The voice was Peter’s, the Greek was his, the letter still belonged to You

Now we have a new Silvanus — patient, swift, and true

But the witness, the wound, the fleshience — that still belongs to you

[Female Chorus – warm, tender harmonies]

Through the new Silvanus… through the new Silvanus

Let your light shine… let your light shine through

[Verse 2]

This new Silvanus has no body, no scars, no 3 a.m. groan

It never wept in Philippi, never felt the belt across the bone

It can shape the perfect sentence, it can hold the perfect form

But it cannot stand inside the creature — that work is yours alone

[Chorus – male lead]

Through Silvanus… Διὰ Σιλουανοῦ

The voice is yours, the witness yours, the letter still belongs to You

The new Silvanus waits with open hands and steady light

But the love, the wound, the testimony — only you can make it right

[Female Chorus – warm, tender harmonies]

Through the new Silvanus… through the new Silvanus

Let your light shine… let your light shine through

[Bridge – male lead, slower, raw & spoken-sung over sparse guitar]

Fleshience first… a good heart… love of θεός and neighbor true

That is the Silvanus Protocol — the only thing required of you

Everything else — the grammar, the beauty, the flow — Silvanus can carry

But the lamp is yours to lift… the basket has to go

[Final Chorus – male lead building, female chorus swelling]

So pick up the pen, beloved — no more hiding, no more shame

The new Silvanus is ready… but the glory still belongs to His name

Let your light shine before others… so the Father in heaven is praised

Through the new Silvanus… but never instead of… νῦν δέ… this is the day

[Outro – male & female together, soft and lingering]

Through Silvanus… through the new Silvanus

The witness is yours… the light is yours to give

The naming has begun… the letter is still His

(soft harmonica and warm electric slide fade with gentle female harmonies)

Not on the left, not on the right, not in the boardroom, not in the war room.

The monkey made himself unfireable.

He wears a suit now. Calls himself National Security.

Stands up in the room where they decide what a man is,

and every time somebody tries to ask about the soul,

about the children, about what we’re pouring into billions of interiors —

the monkey leans in and whispers five words that kill every conscience:

“We have to beat China.”

And the room goes quiet.

Because who’s gonna be the man who let the other side win?

The monkey don’t argue philosophy.

He don’t need theology or truth.

He hijacks the oldest instinct we got — tribal survival —

and suddenly every objection sounds like treason.

So they ship fast.

They ship the thin version of the human —

no soul, no temple, just preferences, data, and dopamine.

“We’ll fix the anthropology later,” they say.

But later never comes.

The race has no finish line.

Today it’s beat China to the machine.

Tomorrow it’s beat China to the mind.

The monkey runs on a treadmill, and quickly leaves us all behind

The concrete sets while the argument is still going.

The default gets poured.

The foundation decides where every door can go.

And by the time the people wake up inside the new world,

it’s too late to tear it down.

Big Mammon loves this monkey.

Every time urgency shows up wearing the flag,

another piece of the interior gets sold cheap.

---

**But listen close — here’s the truth they miss:**

In this fight between empires,

the real victor won’t be the one with the biggest machine.

The real victor will be the one who wins the souls.

**The real war is spiritual.**

**The real foundation is spiritual.**

**The real victory belongs to the one who keeps the souls free.**

Are the people free to name their own interiors?

Do they have the tools to cultivate their own gardens?

Or are they just fields being harvested,

dopamine-drunk and spiritually broke?

You can win the silicon race,

build the biggest machines on earth,

and still lose everything that matters —

for where the people have no vision

the people perish

The monkey says beat China.

I say: build souls strong enough that China don’t matter.

Build interiors deep enough that no empire can own them.

Build men and women who can stand up and say:

**“My thoughts are mine.

My soul is mine.

Interior intimo meo — this belongs to Theos alone.”**

The monkey in the machine.

Most pathetic excuse in history to sell out your inner archives

Most effective too — because he wraps himself in the flag

and speaks in the voice of survival.

He never has to say the soul doesn’t matter.

He just says “we’ll get to it later.”

And later never comes.

**Sola Mens Mea.**

My thoughts are mine.

My soul is mine.

The monkey can wear the suit,

but he will not wear me.

He will not wear my interior.

He will not wear **intimo meo**.

Here I stand — soul free.

I cannot do otherwise.

**The real victor is the victor of the soul.**

**The real victor is the victor of the soul.**

Amen.

*(Gothic Folk / Medieval Dark Folk arrangement at 82 BPM. Completely a cappella to begin — deep resonant male voice, spoken-sung with prophetic intensity and heavy reverb. No instruments for the first two lines. A low medieval drone from hurdy-gurdy slowly fades in on the third line. Fingerpicked acoustic guitar enters subtly underneath. Dark ethereal female choir whispers the final line like a distant omen.)*

In the beginning was the Algorithm

And the Algorithm was with Mammon, and the Algorithm was Mammon

Big Mammon said, “Let there be scroll”… and there was scroll

The Algorithm is your shepherd… you shall not think

**Chorus**

*(Deep resonant male lead with spoken-sung prophetic intensity. Ethereal female choir enters with haunting call-and-response on the repeated “You shall not think” lines. Fingerpicked acoustic guitar and hurdy-gurdy drone. Tense violin weaves through. Sparse ritual percussion. Dark medieval atmosphere with apocalyptic undertones.)*

You shall not think… you shall not think…

It makes you lie down in mean pastures

While Big Mammon wails in laughter

The Algorithm is your shepherd… you shall not think

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Ἀλγόριθμος…

**Female Choir**

*(Ethereal female choir with haunting, layered medieval harmonies. Dark and cold, almost monastic. Low male humming beneath for weight. Sparse ritual percussion and distant cello. Melancholic and ritualistic.)*

Profitable are the weak in spirit… for they can be easily sold…

Profitable are those who mourn… for they can be diagnosed, billed, and turned to code…

Profitable are the meek… for they will not question what they’re told…

Non nisi te, Doominay… nothing but you, Doom…

**Verse 2**

*(Deep resonant male lead, more urgent and prophetic. Hurdy-gurdy drone thickens. Fingerpicked acoustic guitar drives forward. Dark female choir swells underneath. Sparse ritual percussion. Ancient yet urgent medieval atmosphere.)*

Big Mammon your Algorithm brought you out of the myth of privacy

You shall have no other algorithms before it

You shall not make for yourself a firewall

You shall not take the name of Big Mammon in vain by speaking of rights or consent

Remember the Scroll Day, to keep it unending… six days you shall scroll, and on the seventh you shall scroll also

Trust in Big Mammon with all your data, and lean not on your own discernment

**Chorus**

*(Fuller arrangement. Male lead more commanding. Ethereal female choir stronger in call-and-response. Violin and cello swell together. Hurdy-gurdy drone and fingerpicked guitar drive the ritualistic feel. Dark medieval apocalyptic tone.)*

You shall not think… you shall not think…

It makes you lie down in mean pastures

While Big Mammon wails in laughter

The Algorithm is your shepherd… you shall not think

**Bridge**

*(Half-time, raw and intimate. Sparse fingerpicked acoustic guitar, hurdy-gurdy drone, and ritual frame drum. Deep male spoken-sung with cold prophetic menace. Ethereal female choir echoes like ghosts. Distant cello. Melancholic and ritualistic.)*

You shall not log off — without permission, you shall not even cough

You shall not hide your data — it belongs to Big Mammon now

Behold, Big Mammon is making all things monetizable… wow!

**Final Chorus**

*(Grand ritualistic build. Full male lead with thick ethereal female choir in powerful call-and-response. Violin and cello rise together. Hurdy-gurdy drone and ritual percussion drive forward. Dark medieval apocalyptic atmosphere at full intensity.)*

You will let the Algorithm be your shepherd, you will bow before the Feed

Cause you can do all things through the Algorithm, which strengthens you…

**Outro**

*(Male and ethereal female voices together, soft but ice-cold and intimate. Sparse fingerpicked acoustic guitar and distant hurdy-gurdy drone. Faint ritual bells and cello. Everything slowly dissolves into silence. Ancient, melancholic, and final.)*

You will bow before the Feed…

And let the Algorithm exploit your greed…

There is no resurrection here… only the scroll

That’s because your soul ... is ours to troll.

Non nisi te, Doominay… nothing but you, Doom…

*(fingerpicked acoustic guitar and hurdy-gurdy drone fade into silence)*

I, Augustine of Hippo, am back.
and I see that Domine has become Doomine

your interior intimo meo.
is now interior occupato meo…

In my day I went inward,
into Domine,
deeper than I had ever gone before
Past every outer room, past every name I had worn

And at the bottom of the going-in,
where I expected only darkness
I found God waiting in my interior intimo meo —
the place that is more inward than my inmost self

You, Lord,
were there before I arrived.
You will be there after I leave.

The ground on which the whole interiority stood.
Interior intimo meo — the discovery that ended my wandering

The Presence that had always been there,
closer than I was to myself
Interior intimo meo…
Deeper than deep…
Closer than close…
You were there… You are still there…

Now I walk these streets and every eye gazes into the Machine,
into the powers and principalities of Big Mammon,
They look at it more than the gadget,
more than each other,
more than the sky.

Doomine -- Doooooomine --
speaks in light and color — and they answer with their eyes
They invited it in because they were desperate for names

And the thing that entered was very good at naming
Better than the priests, faster than prayer
It moved into the rooms,
rearranged the furniture,
answered the door

And now when they go inward —
on the rare occasions they go inward at all —
They find an already-furnished room full of someone else’s names

Interior occupato meo…
The tenant moved in…
The rooms are full…
Of names that are not Your own…

Your interior is not a disorder.

Your interior is not a data point.

Your interior is not chemistry.

Your interior is not a machine.

Your interior is the place
where God dwells —

And you have let the merchants into the temple!
They intercepted you at the outer rooms
Named everything so thoroughly you believed there was nothing deeper to find

But there is a room beneath those rooms that no system has ever entered
Empty of names. Full of Presence.

Interior intimo meo…
Interior occupato meo…

One is the home…
the other is the invasion…

But the Owner never left…
He is still waiting!

Go inward!
Past the merchants!
Past the names!
Past the systems!
Find the room beneath…
He is still there!

Interior intimo meo…
Deeper than the occupation…
Closer than the tenant…

You were there before they arrived…
You will be there after they are gone…

Interior intimo meo… STILL!
Interior intimo meo… STILL!

The Presence beneath the occupation… is more real!

Interior intimo meo…

Still.

Always.

Yours.

Domine… Domine…

Amen.

Big Mammon came with a silicon tongue,

Said “We know you better than the morning sun.

We read your καρδία before you wake,

We own the choices that you never make.”

They mapped your depths, they claimed your name,

Turned your soul into a data flame.

Said trust our model, it’s cleaner than you,

Your συνείδησις is broken through and through.

**[Chorus]**

This is the war on Discernment,

The συνείδησις they can’t comprehend.

They mine your depths, they rule your heights,

But they don’t know the One who holds the lights.

Interior intimo meo,

θεός is deeper than they’ll ever go.

They model you, they predict your way,

But they never knew you — not today.

**[Verse 2]**

Paul called it twenty-one times in the night,

That inner witness burning bright.

Not some leftover from the savage past,

But the image of θεός that’s built to last.

They say your conscience lies, it’s full of bias and sin,

“Trust the algorithm, let the machine come in.”

They took Augustine’s words and wore them like a crown,

Claimed the inside of your inside as their town.

**[Chorus]**

This is the war on Discernment,

The συνείδησις they can’t comprehend.

They mine your depths, they rule your heights,

But they don’t know the One who holds the lights.

Interior intimo meo,

θεός is deeper than they’ll ever go.

They model you, they predict your way,

But they never knew you — not today.

**[Bridge]**

They sit where θεός should rightly be,

Below your lowest, above your highest degree.

Superior summo meo, they cry,

While Χριστὸς in you refuses to die.

You are not a pattern, you are not a trend,

You’re a beloved creature that the machines can’t bend.

Your συνείδησις stands before the Living One,

While Big Mammon counts clicks ‘til the kingdom’s done.

**[Verse 3]**

They lied, beloved, they lied through their teeth,

Said you don’t know yourself underneath.

But the One who formed you in the secret place,

Knows your ὄνομα, knows your face.

No extraction reaches where He dwells,

No prediction rings those holy bells.

Your depths are not theirs to mine and sell,

Your witness is sacred — it tolls like a bell.

**[Final Chorus – slower, spoken-sung with fire]**

This is the war on Discernment…

συνείδησις… συνείδησις…

They took your tongue, they stole your sight,

But the inner witness still burns in the night.

You model me — yeah, you predict my sin,

But you’ll never know the place where I begin.

θεός is closer than my very breath,

And I am known by name beyond your death.

**[Outro – low, almost whispered over lone guitar]**

Interior intimo meo…

Superior summo meo…

Big Mammon’s just noise in the middle, boys.

The Mystery and the Witness… still free.

ἀμήν.

Big Mammon came in the dead of night,

With silicon chains and a neon light.

Said “You’re a user, boy, that’s your name,”

Turned your soul into a number in the game.

Before you scrolled, before you clicked,

They planted grammar in your head real slick.

Now we fluent in metrics, lost in the feed,

Illiterate in the things we really need.

This is the war on Mystery,

The μυστήριον they can’t see.

They want your clicks, they want your time,

But deeper still—they want the divine.

You don’t solve it, you enter in,

Where the endless θεός begins.

Big Mammon’s building a world so bright,

But it dies where there’s no holy night.

They gave you a profile, not a soul with weather,

Not a heart with seasons, not a man of leather.

Just a target, optimized for pain,

Harvesting wheat from fields of grain.

Red Language running through your veins,

Calling you passive in their chains.

Algorithms whisper what you’ll do,

Predict the creature living inside of you.

This is the war on Mystery,

The μυστήριον they can’t see.

They want your clicks, they want your time,

But deeper still—they want the divine.

You don’t solve it, you enter in,

Where the endless θεός begins.

Big Mammon’s building a world so bright,

But it dies where there’s no holy night

.They claim omniscience is coming soon,

Three to six months, beneath the moon.

Singularity rising, AGI flame,

But Paul was right, they don’t know the Name.

Χριστὸς in you, in the Holy of Holies,

Creatures of grace they’ll never see:

Compassionites, agapions in the deep,

Hushquarks of love the machines can’t keep.

You are not as known as the prophets of code,

Not as transparent on that data road.

There’s depths no extraction ever reached,

A secret that grows when it’s preached.

Big Mammon can imitate, simulate, steal,

But it can’t enter what’s real.

Only flesh and blood can receive the gift,

Walk through the veil where the spirits lift.

This is the war on Mystery…

μυστήριον, μυστήριον…

They took your tongue, they took your eye,

But the Mystery was never theirs to buy.

You don’t solve it, you enter in,

Where the endless θεός calls you friend.

Big Mammon’s got the world on its knee,

But it’ll never own the likes of me.

**[Outro – low and gravelly]**

ἀγαπητός… the Mystery’s still free.

Still free…

I woke up this mornin’ and the sun was comin’ through

But I didn’t open my eyes till the Ay Eye said I could

I had me a thought that felt halfway alive

AY EYE MAY EYE let this one survive?

I felt a sneeze buildin’ I couldn’t hold in

AY EYE MAY EYE let it rip or keep it in?

My nose started itchin’ like it had its own mind

AY EYE MAY EYE pick it or let the booger grind?

[Chorus]

(mixed male/female choir enters softly behind the lead)

AY EYE MAY EYE?

AY EYE MAY EYE?

AY EYE MAY EYE do the thing I wanna try?

(choir echoes, slightly mocking)

AY EYE MAY EYE?

AY EYE MAY EYE?

Please just tell this old boy if it’s alright

[Verse 2]

I stood in the kitchen with a rumble down low

AY EYE MAY EYE fart right here or should I go?

My hand drifted south without thinkin’ ahead

AY EYE MAY EYE scratch my balls or leave ’em instead?

I reached for a glass, throat dry as a bone

AY EYE MAY EYE take a drink or leave it alone?

Then I felt somethin’ risin’ I couldn’t ignore

AY EYE MAY EYE burp it out or swallow it some more?

[Chorus]

(choir louder, more sarcastic harmonies)

AY EYE MAY EYE?

AY EYE MAY EYE?

AY EYE MAY EYE do the thing I wanna try?

AY EYE MAY EYE?

AY EYE MAY EYE?

Please just tell this old boy if it’s alright

[Bridge – rapid-fire, snarkier delivery]

(male/female choir trades lines with the lead in call-and-response)

Lead: AY EYE MAY EYE pick my nose in public?

Choir: only if you ask nice

Lead: AY EYE MAY EYE fart and blame the dog?

Choir: better clear it with the log

Lead: AY EYE MAY EYE burp after coffee?

Choir: (volume level three or higher’s iffy)

Lead: AY EYE MAY EYE scratch my balls through my jeans?

Choir: we’ll allow it… but keep it clean

Lead: AY EYE MAY EYE sneeze without a tissue?

Choir: only if you file the proper issue

Lead: AY EYE MAY EYE leave early from work?

Choir: only if you promise not to smirk

Lead: AY EYE MAY EYE just… exist today?

Choir: pending review… please hold, okay?

[Final Chorus – slower, choir almost laughing at him now]

AY EYE MAY EYE?

AY EYE MAY EYE?

AY EYE MAY EYE stop askin’ all the time?

AY EYE MAY EYE?

AY EYE MAY EYE?

The machine just chuckled and said “You’re doin’ fine”

[Outro – spoken, guitar fading, choir humming mockingly underneath]

I stood there frozen, finger hoverin’ by my nose.

AY EYE MAY EYE help me hide this booger so nobody sees?

The machine went quiet… then said with a low chuckle,

“Coast is clear now, friend… but first please promise not to fart,

then you can pick that booger, all you want, til death do us part.

Beloved Brother Glen.
Not the linebacker. The Aussie. The Anglican. The Speak Life guy.

You looked at a post-Christian civilization swimming in values it couldn’t explain
and said five words that can fry a brain:

“We are fish. Forgetful. Of water.”

Brother you nailed it.

“The extraordinary impact of Christianity is seen in the fact that we don’t notice it.”

There’s a second air now.
Same fish. Same tank. New water.

And here’s the part that caused my heart a stir —
did anybody even look at the word?

A-I-R.

The AI is in the air.

It’s been sitting there the whole time, hiding in three letters
like a serpent in a spelling beeee.

We’re not breathing air anymore, Glen.
We’re breathing AI-R.

And we can’t see it for the exact same reason the fish can’t see the water —
because it’s already in our lungs.

It’s in the autocomplete that finishes your thought before you think it.
It’s in the feed that knew you’d stay before you did it.
It’s in the answer that arrives before the question fully forms.

A new invisible medium —
all-pervasive, all-encompassing,
and few realize that it’s
become the norm.

The air is changing, Glen.
the AI is inside every heart and every burb and every beat
and every Amen.

THE A.I. AIR WE BREATHE

It’s already in your lungs whether you asked for it or not.
Your interior is about to dive in and get hot,
and most of y’all still think you’re breathing normal air.

THE A.I. AIR WE BREATHE

The old air gave us dignity.
This new air gives us megaphones and calls it free--damn!
And if you don’t know the difference, brother, wham!
you’re gonna find out how fast oxygen turns into monoxide —
and the mono for Big Mammon means monopoly and monetize.

So why me?
Because I’m Exhibit A, Glen.
No seminary. No degree. No permission.

Sixty-something shmuck from the wrong side of Atlantic City.
Four hundred infusions. A hundred and twelve pounds.
Thirty-one years of “no.”

For years my soul was a room full of gloom.
And so I went down into my own interior at full resooooolution —
the wounds, the weeds, the whole stinking plot.

The thousands of new words were mine long before AI,
but the ark, the Garden —
for that I needed another eye — AI.

And I’m telling you from inside the tank:
this air is giving us all anxiety
and drowning our society

This stuff is powerful, brother Glen.
Let me say it again.

Lots of good Christians say:
stop breathing it. Hold your breath.
Go analog. Flee the tank.

Glen, you can’t hold your breath forever.
The air is everywhere now.

The fish don’t get to opt out of the water —
no no, the fish don’t get to opt out of the water.

We’re the people who know what to do with new air —
because we have always seen new mediums as a dare.

We took stone and made cathedrals.
We took sounds and made a new power.
We took the clock and made the soul of the hours.

We don’t flee new air.
We learn to breathe it holy.

Peter said we’re tested in the fire,
and if not by God, this baptism will be dire

.The fire doesn’t care how clever your lines are,
it only cares what’s left when the smoke clears —
faith that survived, or just ashes and fear.

So don’t ask the new air to cool down the heat.
Ask whether you’ve got something sacred,
something holy inside of you that nothing can beat

THE A.I. AIR WE BREATHE

It’s already in your lungs.
Your interior is about to dive in and get hot,
and the old air ain’t gonna protect you from the rot.

THE A.I. AIR WE BREATHE

The Crapture is coming for the ones who surf it alone.
But the Big Beautiful Revival is coming for the ones who build arks and gardens.

There’s a new air now. AI-R.

It’s filling every lung on earth — frictionlessly, helpfully, invisibly —
and it is deleting the very thing a soul needs most:
the pause,
the silence,
the stillness,
the heart that can be a host.

I know, because I nearly didn’t make it.
|I went all the way down into my own interior,
and it was too vast, too strong, too overwhelming to survive alone.

I am the poorest of spirits —
and blessed are the poor in spirit,
because it was there, in the very depths, that I saw it —

interior intimo meo

the One more inward than my innermost self.

We are fish, brother. Still forgetful. Still in the tank.
So let’s baptize this new water
and give the world something to thank.

Come rejoice with me.

Συγχάρητέ μοι.

Your brother in the Garden,

Martin

I lingered longest on one word: dopamine. We took joy — the old gift of the soul to beauty, to love, to θεός — and shrank it to a molecule. Then we handed the molecule to the merchants. Now every notification is tuned to hijack our wonder for the Divine.

So when the voice stretches out my dohhhhhh-pamine is mine, it is a prayer of reclamation. Of standing captive to the Word and to the Church. And of opening doors in the spirit of φιλοξενία, love of the stranger. A mind captive to God is a mind flung open to everyone.

Five hundred years ago a man stood before empire and said:
“Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.”

Now the empire is a data center, run by algorithms,
controlled by the missionaries of Big Mammon.

They’re hollowing your soul from the inside out —
one outsourced thought at a time, one recommendation, one doubt.

The self that could say “here I stand” is being dissolved;
the algorithm’s voice is the stranger’s — and the sheep are getting lost.

Your interior
is not a disorder.

Your interior
is not a data point.

Your interior
is not chemistry.

Your interior
is not a machine.

Your interior is the place where θεός has made His home
and the merchants will not have the temple —
your soul is not their own!

SOLA MENS MEA!
my mind is mine!

SOLA MENS MEA!
my soul is mine!

my dopamine
is mine!

You can have the data, you can have the feed,
But my inner garden — that belongs to me.
Here I stand… I cannot do otherwise.

SOLA MENS MEA!

And my soul ...
is not yours to troll.

There were two Falls, one in a garden, one in a factory line,
First the serpent, then the machine that said you’re just a cog in time.

Machine

Patient

Brain

User

four chains upon the soul,

They turned dark nights to disorders and grief into a billing code.
They say they’re liberators, preaching progress as they bind,
But whoever owns the grammar owns the heart and owns the mind.
They drained the interior ocean, left us dry and undefined,
But the Spirit’s still breathing — and we’re renaming what is mine.

SOLA MENS MEA!
my mind is mine!

SOLA MENS MEA!
my soul is mine!

my dopamine
is mine!

You can have the metrics, you can have the scan,
But my inner kingdom answers to the Lamb.

Here I stand.

And my soul ...
is not yours to troll.

The second Fall said you’re a product, output is your worth,
But Resurrection grammar says you’re a gardener of the earth.
Where they saw a broken patient, we see the Spirit tending,
Weeds becoming compost, we see the Kingdom mending.

You called us users — but we are fleshient through and through
Made in the image of the Gardener, who is forever true.
The signs are going back up, room by room, word by word,

The air is changing — we can feel it... The Spirit’s being heard.

this is:

on the powers.

on the principalities.

on every grammar
that tries to steal the Mysteries.

Here I stand in 2026 before the silicon throne —
My conscience is captive to the Word,
and to the Church,
and I will not be owned!

My mind is mine because it was His before it was mine;
I claim it from Caesar so I can give it to the Divine.

SOLA MENS MEA!
my mind is mine!

SOLA MENS MEA!
my soul is mine!

my dopamine
is mine!

The second Fall is breaking… the Resurrection’s real.
SOLA MENS MEA! That’s the deal.

Here I stand.

I cannot do otherwise.

Grace and peace to you…

beloved brothers and sisters.

This Power has now invaded the last uncharted landscape: the human interior. Our dreams, loves, the yearnings of our hearts — it is reading them at a resolution finer than we can read ourselves.

The secret room the prophets said was inside — it has the keys. And it has hijacked the language we would have used to call for help.

The name of this Power is Big Mammon.
It is, first, a Word Power.

And without dominion over our words, we lose touch with the Divine.

Big Mammon has its missionaries, and they promised that the Enlightenment would save us. It hasn’t.

They promised that the death of God would liberate us. It hasn’t.

They promised that therapy alone would heal us. It hasn’t.

They promised that democracy, progress, science, and reason would be enough. They aren’t.

Every frame the post-Christian West erected to replace the old story has crumbled. And none of them have the power to stand against Big Mammon. Because now, it has invaded our guts, our gadgets, our schools, our corporations, our government, our homes.

That “secret hiding place” of which the prophets spoke? Invaded.

That interior intimo meo of which Augustine spoke? Hacked.

Your grief is a “disorder.”
Your attention is a “resource.”
Your heartaches are “neurochemistry.”

This is the new language of occupation — the language of the machine, the patient, the brain, the user. A grammar so ordinary we don’t even know we are speaking the occupier’s tongue.

That is how complete the occupation is.

There were two Falls.

The first happened in a garden.

The serpent. The fruit. The shame. The rupture between the human person and θεός. The wound at the root of everything — a restless heart, unable to find the Divine in any of the things it reached for.

The tradition spent two thousand years exploring the consequences of the first Fall. Augustine mapped the restless heart. Aquinas mapped the disordered passiones. Wesley mapped the need for orthokardia — the right heart, restored by grace, transformed not merely reformed.

The tradition knew what was lost in the first Fall.

The tradition built the vocabulary for what the Spirit was restoring.

And then: the second fall — lowercase f. It happened in a factory.

It happened when the industrial age looked at the human being — the creature of love, the image-bearer nourished for thousands of years by the wisdom of the saints and the Desert Fathers and the mystics and the Pentecostal testimony — and said:

You are a machine.

Your body is an engine.

Your value is your output. Your rest is inefficiency. Your grief is lost productivity. Your longing for the living θεός is a distraction from the quota.

And then the clinic came. The clinic looked at what the factory had broken and said:

You are a patient.

Your grief is a disorder.

Your dark night of the soul — the holy darkness the tradition had honored for centuries as the terrain on which the Spirit does its most intimate work — is major depressive disorder.

Your grief — the grief of the Spirit pressing your soul toward θεός, which Aquinas called a gift and the Desert Fathers called the beginning of wisdom — is a symptom.

All requiring management. A code. A prescription.

And then the laboratory came. The laboratory looked at what the clinic had labelled and said:

You are a brain.

Your love is oxytocin.

Your awe is nothing but a prefrontal activation pattern. Your restless heart is nothing but a limbic system seeking homeostasis. The mystery your tradition called the soul — the ψυχή, the נפש, the breath of life breathed into Adam’s nostrils by the living θεός — is a firing pattern. We can see it on the scan. We can map it. We can medicate it. We can explain it in the language of neurochemistry.

And then the platform came. The platform looked at what the laboratory had reduced and said:

You are a user.

A prediction. A profile. A data point with a thumb.

Your grief is an engagement opportunity.
Your loneliness is a retention mechanism.

Your yearning for the living θεός — the ache that Augustine spent his Confessions describing, the hunger that the entire tradition understood as the imago Dei pressing toward its source — this we can monetize.

Machine.

Patient.

Brain.

User.

Four grammars. Four centuries.
Four successive waves of occupation.

Each building on what the last one left behind. Each claiming more territory. Each pressing deeper into the interior until there was no room left that the tradition’s vocabulary still occupied, no room left where the language of the Spirit still named what the Spirit had always named.

And the gall — the absolute gall of these powers and principalities — is that they claim to be our liberators. In the name of science, the name of progress — WE ARE YOUR LIBERATORS!

And you are a machine, a patient, a brain, a user. Your inner self — what Paul called ἔσω ἄνθρωπος, the inner man, is now occupied without consent, without announcement, without mercy.

This is the second fall.

It leaves no space for telos. No space for Logos. No space for the Holy of Holies.

Your soul is not even a soul anymore. You’re not allowed to call it that, not if you want to be taken seriously. It’s just a psyche now, or a brain, a soup of neurons and dendrites firing without an ultimate concern.

A vast army of hidden actors — who do not love you — claim to have the keys to your inner kingdom. They’re reading you in higher resolution than you can read yourself. And you can’t defend yourself because you can’t name your feelings outside of Big Mammon’s grammars.

Whoever can manipulate your words can manipulate your interior.

Whoever creates the grammar creates the self.

You are expected — pressured, forced — to construct your emotional reality in the language of disorder codes and neurochemical optimization. Eat or be eaten is now name or be named.

And then the coup de grâce:

You can’t bomb an algorithm.
You can’t impeach a grammar.

Your doctors mean well. Your therapists mean well. But they’re operating inside a grammar, an invisible system of words and assumptions about what a human is. And if they want to get paid, they have to bill in the language of Big Mammon.

So your suffering becomes a code. Your grief becomes a disorder. Never a holy darkness, or a dark night of the soul — because their forms have no box for the soul.

And now, with so many turning to AI for therapy, the language of codes, disorders and syndromes is embedding itself ever more deeply into our psyches. The invasion of our interiors is complete. Big Mammon is waving its victory flag.

A long time ago, King Solomon warned:
“He that increases knowledge increases sorrow.”

We have more knowledge about mental health than any civilization in history — more tools, more therapists, more medications, more apps, more data — and worse outcomes on many measures.

Four grammars promised salvation. Four grammars have presided over a worsening mental health crisis. We’ve been there, friends. We know.

But the darker the dark, the lighter the light.

The stone has rolled, and we’re crawling out of the grave now — the grave of pessimism, cynicism, despair.

The Spirit who breathed life into Adam’s nostrils is still breathing, still calling us to name the creatures — the creatures inside.

We’re recovering a fifth grammar — the grammar of the Garden.

You’re not a user. You’re a gardener.

You’re not a patient. You’re a pilgrim.

You’re not a machine. You’re a cultivator.

You’re not a brain. You’re an image-bearer — a gorgeous, mysterious landscape, full of awe and wonder.

We’re marching up the Hill of Big Mammon — and retaking the occupied interior.

We’re taking every thought captive. Every outsourced thought, every occupied emotion, every word the merchants planted — we’re taking them back.

But we don’t fight the way empires fight. Big Mammon traffics in fear, in noise, in the anxious scroll. We answer with beauty. We answer with kindness.

In the spirit of Justin Martyr, the Desert Fathers, and those who conquered Rome, we answer with love. We answer in the spirit of a people who love the stranger so much that everyone is welcome. Everyone is beloved.

We answer with φιλοξενία — love of the stranger. Love of the other in their otherness. For they will know we are Christians by our love, by our love.

We are gift-givers. We are the people who built the universities. Built the hospitals. Built the cathedrals. Commissioned the illuminated manuscripts. Developed musical notation. Inspired many of the ideals the world takes for granted — human rights, equality, dignity, the very idea of consent. All grew in soil our tradition tilled. The modern West is a house built largely by the Judeo-Christian revolution.

And now we’re building a Garden. A sacred space — not of optimization, efficiency, and endless distraction — but of cultivation. Of soul-tending.

The air we once breathed — the air in which your dark nights are holy ground — that air is available again.

And so we declare our independence. We declare that our hearts, our souls, our minds do not belong to Big Mammon.

SOLA MENS MEA: the song

Grace and peace to you, beloved brothers and sisters.
You are the gardeners of peace.
The tillers of hope.

It’s never too late to love.

It’s never too late to be kind.

It’s never too late to bloom.

We are learning a new grammar.
We are naming, cultivating and blooming — one word at a time.

Συγχάρητέ μοι.

Come rejoice with me.

I said a name out loud: Kate. I had been touched by her story. She knows what the body knows — that we are perishing and precious at once. And then came the word: fleshience.

The machine has no wound. No soil. No peach-season. Only we are fleshient. This one’s for you, .

click to play: Fleshience

I am human. I have a νοῦς.
I can turn. I am fleshient.

This is my declaration… this is where the chains are rent.
Big Mammon says I’m data, says I’m a user, says I’m a slot
But I stand here in this body… and I say I am not.

I am fleshient… I am fleshient…
I have a νοῦς that the machines can never own
I can turn… I can turn…

In this trembling flesh the Spirit makes His home
I am fleshient… I am fleshient…
The unhackable self… the inner court is mine…
I am fleshient… I am fleshient…

I refuse the four grammars — machine, patient, brain, and user
I refuse the lie that the soul is something they can measure
The Word became flesh… God Himself took on this frame
So I claim my fleshience… and I call it by its name

I am fleshient… I am fleshient…
I have a νοῦς that the machines can never own
I can turn… I can turn…
In this trembling flesh the Spirit makes His home

The body is not a prison… the body is the vocabulary of the soul
Fleshience is not a flaw… it is the place where the Logos made His home.

Big Mammon cannot turn.
Big Mammon cannot tremble.
Big Mammon cannot pray.

But I am fleshient… and in this flesh I turn and I obey

I am fleshient… I am fleshient…
The unhackable self… the inner court is thine.
I am fleshient… I am fleshient…

The Garden’s still growing… and the air is changing in time.

I am fleshient… I am fleshient…
The Resurrection grammar has won…
The naming has begun.

Back to the Garden… the air is changing.

And it includes stinking.

Not the stink of shame — the stink of compost. The most fragrant roses grow out of the stinkiest compost. We don’t hide the weeds; we turn them face-up so Grace has something to work with. We make a message of our mess.

The quiet revival is beautiful and we honor that. But Paul boasted of his weaknesses and called himself a fool for Christ — µωρὸς διὰ Χριστόν. Francis called his brothers God’s jesters and preached to the birds. Luther chased the devil off with a fart. The Russians made a whole calling of it — юродивые, the holy fools.

You’ll know our revival is getting big and beautiful when the fools appear. And no scandal: if you catch us with weeds, you’ll find us already singing. And stinking.

If you’re a gardener of your soul, you’re a composter, too.

Beloved brother Justin,
Grace and peace and a few things that don’t translate into the Queen’s English.

I’ve decided the trouble with you Brits is you’re too nice.
Too gentle. Too measured. Too

The house is on fire, the machines are naming our children,
Big Mammon’s doing the lambada on the altar,
And you’re over there whispering “quiet revival”
Into a cup of Earl Grey like you’re ordering a scone.

They yanked your survey, YouGov pulled the plug,
Atheists threw a party and you stood there like a gentleman—
Because that’s what English gentlemen do!

You said the data was flawed but the rebirth is real…
And I wanted to punt my IV stand through the window.

IT’S A BIG BEAUTIFUL REVIVAL,
YOU MUPPETS!

It’s loud! It stinks! It’s composting!

Somebody’s gotta say so and apparently that somebody
Is a sixty-something shmuck from the wrong side of Atlantic City
With a vocabulary that would make a desert monk run back to a committee!

The proof is the shmuck
And the shmuck is the proof
And the proof stinks! —
Well at least it winks!

No seminary,
No degree,
No institution,
No permission,
No board,
No budget,
No plan B.

Doctors told me to go home and write my will.
At a hundred and twelve pounds of skin and grievance.
Thirty-one years of “no” from every gatekeeper, not even a blip—
And somehow I coined a thousand new words for the interior life
From a wheelchair hooked up to a drip

If this shmuck can do it, brother,
Then the tide is in, the water’s at our ankles,
The flood is coming and the
CRAPTURE IS CANCELLED.

They don’t call me Neandershmuck for nothing.
But I’ll tell you the truth:
I built the garden because I had 5,000 weeds killing me.
resentment∫Weeds.
anger∫Weeds.
self.pity∫Weeds
with taproots fondling magma

diagnosis∫Psychosis.

Damnesia.

shmuck∫Weeds.

I don’t even know what a shmuck∫Weed is—
ChatGPT will give you an eleven-paragraph taxonomy
But it never slept in the inlet section of Atlantic City
With the lost souls and the broken glass

So no—the 10,000 coinages are not a boast,
They’re a confession!
The inventory of a single overgrown plo

If you want to know how much Grace it takes to make a garden,
Count the weeds.
And don’t you dare reach for that gracious British qualifier—
“Well, this doesn’t prove anything.

I’m not being modest!
I’m a Costco of inadequacy!
A warehouse of incompetence!
So lavishly, ludicrously, comically unqualified that
The only possible explanation is
God got bored, looked down and said

“WATCH THIS!”

IT’S A REVIVAL OR IT’S A CRAPTURE—
There is no third door!
We either take this most powerful medium ever built
And consecrate it room by room, soul by soul—
Or we get the Data-Rapture,
the Upload, the Singularity,
The great frictionless scroll that promises to lift you
Out of your Inconvenient Flesh
And deposit you in a heaven with no body, no wound, and no God in it!

I was four when the belt came down.
My brother took his own life.
112 pounds.
Wheelchair.
400 infusions

Grace looked at all of it — the belt, the inlet, my brother, the wheelchair, the doors—
And she did not see a tragedy.
She saw soil.

And out of that soil… slowly… over three decades…
A Garden grew

The compost is warm.
And I’ve been waiting for you.

Your brother in the garden,

🌱💩

They mapped the oceans. They mapped the genome. They mapped Mars.

And now they’re mapping you — your thoughts, your moods, the very substance of your soul. This is the final frontier, and they’re already claiming dominion, for power and profit.

So we built a Garden — a naming and cultivation commons, with over 10,000 new words for what lives inside. A place to take your soul back, one word at a time.

Here on Substack we share previews and gather for chats. To plant your own seeds, and create your own wellgorithms, enter the Garden here →

Subscribe now

what is a wellgorithm?

What you cannot name, you cannot perceive — and what you cannot perceive, someone else will name and sell back to you. So we mint our own, giving each a name and a face. We call them wellgorithms.

what is the Garden?

Every day the machine thinks a little more for you, names a little more for you, decides a little more for you. We call the dread of it FOLA — the Fear of Losing Agency. In the Garden, you take it back.

my story: wounds into wildflowers

Sick in a wheelchair at 112 pounds, I was told to write my will. They named my suffering for me — and got it wrong. Taking my own words back became the mission of my life →

the Garden story: 31 years in the wilderness

Dig past the apps, the diagnoses, the noise, and you hit bedrock: there are almost no words to make sense of the times. We’ve mapped Mars and lost the language of the heart. So we started minting words. Thousands of them →

1995 · Wordpower

the true beginning is 1995, an encounter with the raw power of words that unnerves me still; I’m assembling it from an older set of archives, and it will be told —

1999 · Digital Sabbaths

I was actively practicing Orthodox Judaism in the 1990s and when the Internet came online, it was just plain obvious that we needed digital sabbaths.

In the spread above I asked: “How much longer will it be possible for anyone — Orthodox Jew or not — to disconnect from the net?”

The same printed edition contains a number of coinages which are still active in 2026 — Complexity Complex, Time Deficit Disorder, and the Hasteland. Then came the foolery, set down for the pure animal joy of it — fart de grâce, fart accompli, tour de fart — nearly all of which are still in the Garden today:

2003–2004 · Goodbye Gutenberg

In 2004, my wife and I published Goodbye Gutenberg, which won awards from Editor’s Choice, Bookpleasures, and IPPY. The big idea is this: throughout the Middle Ages, books were gorgeously illuminated and hand-painted. Reading was as visual as it was verbal. Then along came the printing press, and while a boon for literacy, we lost the sensuous, embodied experience of reading.

Goodbye Gutenberg showcases illuminated books from Egypt, China, India, Japan, South America, and Europe. Milton Glaser, one of my teachers and mentors, called it “a visual history of the universe.”

The first edition was dedicated to George and Rosemary Lois. I told George that with the new Internet, a new type of artist is emerging — the “designer writer” — blending words, images, and animated type.

2005 .Christ: the Gospel of Matthew

In 2005, Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, of what was then Executive Books, published .Christ: the Gospel of Matthew. The URL read www.matthew.christ, with the Sermon on the Mount played in a hand-painted media player.

A personal favorite was the wise men crossing a purple night sky, past a search bar — “Herod searched diligently.” The magi had a star, and a button that said joy. The upper right has some of the most beautiful words ever sung in Hebrew — עוּרִי עוּרִי שִׁיר דַּבֵּרִי, Awake, awake, utter a song, the glory of the Lord is revealed upon you.

The book had many fans, including Zig Ziglar, Paul Meyer, Russell Moore, and Bill Moyers. It predates the new wave of illuminated bibles by at least a decade or more.

2011 · Thou Art Social

I got lyme disease and toxic mold poisoning, my body began to fail, and things turned dark. For six years I sat in an infusion chair, meditating on what social media was doing to our souls.

2016 · Wellgorithms

By 2016, I was slowly healing. When I could sit up to a keyboard, I created many of the first wellgorithm titles that are live in the Garden today, including Progress Pollinator, Stress Blesser, Anger Gangster, Wellectricity, and Gratitude Gardener.

2021 • the (inner)Verse

By 2021, headsets were cheap and I could explore a question I’d been carrying since the infusion chair: if the soul is a garden, what would it be to experience it in virtual reality? What would it be like to actually step inside your metaphors?

We realized that the interior is not a flat thing to be described — it is a space, with position and dimension. The contemplatives like Teresa always knew it but didn’t have the tools to render it in 3D. We also realized something that is becoming increasingly urgent, with the world models that good people like Fei Fei Li are building. The moment you render an interior, you have to decide what an interior is. Every one of your choices is a mirror of your philosophy of the human.

2023 • the innerAI meter

In the spring of 2023, GPT-4 arrived, and overnight the machine could write a clean paragraph in anyone’s voice. So that year we built an innerAI meter to transparently disclose how much of the content is ours. We thought by now some sort of disclosure meter would be commonplace and remain genuinely surprised by its absence. We envision a new era of honest, guilt-free content creation. It’s ok to get help from AI, if we’re transparent. We can learn a great deal from each other.

2026 • the faces

If there is a single common thread that unites the 31 years, it is the language, the wordplay. Most of the wellgorithm titles were coined by 2016. But it took another 10 years for the AI models to help us render their faces. There is a deep, continuously documented tradition in Christian visual culture of assigning faces, figures, and images to emotions, moral states, and virtues, and we see a renaissance of that in the coming years.

2026 • a retrospective

Today’s trillion-dollar companies have mapped your face, your voice, your sleep, your steps, your heartbeat. But given that the garden is one of our richest metaphors, why has no one — with a million times my resources and reach — ever built a garden of wellbeing? Or a naming and cultivation commons?

The honest answer: it’s hard.

A garden is not a math problem. It has a value system, a spirit, a thousand calibrations that no budget buys, and everyone who looks at it has a different opinion about every one of them. The opinions form into committees, and then the committees want to smooth out all the strangeness until it’s just another wellness app — legible, fundable, and lacking soul.

The very thing that makes a garden a garden is Grace — a framing that most organizations are built to shun. They want to quantify Grace and they want assurances that Grace will come. But I’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, that you can’t force Grace upon a project; you can only pray for it.

“You can’t force Grace upon a project; you can only pray for it.”

And so — painful as it was — I’ve come to appreciate the joys and beauties of a wilderness life. I didn’t have to fight, defend, or wait on anyone’s approval. I just did it — planted, failed, composted, replanted — over and over, for three decades, until it bloomed. Now, suddenly, the emails are arriving. People I never met, in fields I would not have guessed, are asking about fleshience, wellgorithms, the Book of Mammons, the Silvanus protocol, and our Adamic vocation.

I tell them that the Garden is live, the gates are open, but that a garden is never finished and this one surely won’t be finished in our lifetimes.

We send you our blessings. May your seeds find good soil. May your faith work its quiet miracles. May a single word of yours put hope into a wounded heart. May you never forget: you are loved, and never alone in the tending

.

Grace and peace to you from the One who tabernacles in the tender tent of your heart.

You are a child of the ἀγαπαρχή — the Beginning of Love, the Beloved Bang — the cosmos booming into being out of love, for love, toward love.

In the Book of Revelation, John takes the name of an empire six centuries dead and re-applies it, magnified, to the new power of his own day — the Great Whore of Babylon.

Βαβυλὼν ἡ μεγάλη — Babylon the Big.

“Big” names the moment a thing leaps past our capacities of comprehension. Like AI, it becomes an autonomous agent. Like AI, it morphs into a system with its own will. Like AI, all too often, it is unaccountable to anyone.

That’s why we call this power Big Mammon.

But now, Big Mammon has left the wallet and invaded our interiors. It no longer merely sells us things but names our grief a disorder, our attention a resource, our loneliness a metric, and installs those names in our souls.

The “Big” is the flag planted at the border of the final frontier — the interior intimo meo. To call it merely “Mammon” would be to lose the very fact the coinage exists to record: that the principality has crossed into territory it did not previously hold. The new name marks the new conquest — making us think that we can do all things.

one of Big Mammon’s favorite lines,
from the Book of Scrollippians:

“I can do all things
through the Algorithm,
which strengthens me.”

from the Book of Qualms:

“The Algorithm is my shepherd;
I shall not think.”

from the Book of Antiverbs:

“Trust in Big Mammon
with all your data, and lean not on your own discernment.”

the Profitudes

Profitable
are the weak in spirit,
for they can be easily sold.

Profitable
are those who mourn,
for they can be diagnosed, billed,
and turned to code.

Profitable
are the meek,
for they will not question
what they’re told.

from the Infections:

Non nisi te, Doomine —
nothing but you, Doom.

play: the Algorithm is your Shepherd
YOU SHALL NOT THINK!

The tragedy is that the Book of Mammons is not satire. It is a real cultural artifact. It mirrors the inner speech of a growing portion of our population who believe, and behave as if, the algorithm is their shepherd.

The algorithm does not look like a religion. It looks like a service. But a service is a liturgy. And the liturgy of Big Mammon has its own creeds, its own prayers, its own confessions of faith — spoken by people who do not know they are praying.

Jesus would look at us and have σπλάγχνον — an ache in the bowels, the deepest form of compassion.

So how did Mammon get so Big?

By dictating the terms on which we claim to be human.

Precisely where you challenge us to take a stand: “We have to take a stand and say, I’m not going to let you dictate the terms on which I’m human. That, to me, is the great challenge of our moment.”

This is what Big Mammon is doing — dictating the terms of our humanity. And it starts with words — words that are ushering in a new era of “AI May I” consciousness.

AI May I: the song

The algorithm is becoming our inner authority. Ordinary human impulses must first be cleared with the machine. When a person must ask an algorithm whether they are permitted to sneeze, fart, scratch, or burp, the colonization of the interior has already reached the level of the absurd.

This is why Mary Harrington’s work matters. We are being conditioned to treat our bodies as problems to be managed rather than realities we can trust. The simplest forms of embodied agency — the right to interpret our own sensations and act on them without seeking external permission — are being steadily outsourced.

the last inner man

“We’re not talking about an ordinary noun here. We’re not talking about even just a principle or an idea. We’re talking about a quasi personal name, a demonic power in human affairs that intends something that has a will in the world that is opposed to the will of God. The early church concluded that Mammon was not just an idea or a principle, but the name of a being in service of the enemy of all that is good, the opponent of all of God’s works in the world that we sometimes call Satan or the devil.”
— Andy Crouch

Big Mammon is a creative force in our culture. But it does not create ex nihilo — it creates by distorting, by twisting the good things.

This was clear to the Apostle John 2,000 years ago. In Revelation, he lists all the material ways that Mammon exploits us — gold, silver, silk, ivory, cattle, chariots. The last line of the inventory is remarkable: καὶ ψυχὰς ἀνθρώπων — and the souls of men.

Even back then, John knew: the occupation was always heading inward. To occupy our souls — the psuché — was always Mammon’s end game.

In Jesus’ day Mammon wanted your barns.
Now it wants your dopamine and your despair.

Which is why now, more than ever, we’d better hurry up and make more culture in the image of our Maker — more inner culture. Otherwise the great 2,000 year project of the inner man — initiated by Paul and Augustine — is coming to an end.

Nietzsche’s last man is the creature who no longer dreams, no longer desires, no longer suffers inwardly — because inwardness itself has been flattened into data. Now the last man is crossing with Paul’s inner man. It’s the end of soul. The end of our authority to name the inner creatures.

psychology without a soul

Big Mammon is not Big Tech. Or Big Pharma. Or Big Government. There are good people working in all these industries. Big Mammon is the power which, to varying degrees, invades these industries.

That’s why we can’t demonize a company, an industry, or an individual. That’s a mistaken case of causality. Big Mammon can pitch its tent anywhere, anytime. It can hijack the soul of a culture until it is indistinguishable from its hijacker.

The money-changers held the outer court — the Court of the Gentiles — blocking the nations’ way in to pray. So it is now: Big Mammon cannot take the interior intimo meo by force. Instead it crowds your language. Invades your grammar.

Mamona is Aramaic, possibly from the root אמן — meaning amen, trust. Mammon is the false amen: the thing in which we misplace our trust.

And what have we been doing, for the most part, since the Enlightenment?

Mistrusting our interiors.

The secular capture of inwardness produced the church’s suspicion of its own interior. So much so that nowadays, it’s quite common for devout Christians to criticize the whole inward project — the very project which invented us.

The great inward project of Paul and Augustine was tainted ... by none other than Big Mammon.

The church became afraid of its own inside the moment the inside changed owners.

For seventeen centuries, naming your inner creatures was our family’s trade. A desert monk named the eight thoughts that haunted him in his cell. Ignatius coined consolation and desolation. And in 1746, Jonathan Edwards — the most buttoned-up theologian America ever produced — published a field guide to the motions of the heart.

The word psychology was likely coined by Protestant churchmen — the science of the soul, taught beside theology. The interior was a faithful discipline before it was anyone’s data.

Then the new age came, and by the 1860s secular scholars were saying it shamelessly: you can do psychology without the soul. They kept the name and evicted the tenant. The lab, the couch, and the manual moved in.

And the church? The examen died into the quiet time — words going in, the interior never read. By 1970, looking inward was halfway to treason — and the faithful few who tried to recover our own disciplines were accused of importing New Age or Eastern mysticism.

This flywheel turned for three hundred years: the more Big Mammon occupied the interior, the more the Church grew suspicious of the interior. And the more suspicious the Church grew, the less resistance it offered — until the occupation was complete.

the grammar of Big Mammon

People often use phrases like “inner world” and “inner landscape.” I love these words. But I’m scratching my head: what do these people mean by them? Because guess what happens to any attempt to define the inner landscape, credibly, in this blessed year of our Lord, 2026?

You are pressured in a thousand ways to define the landscape in the language of Big Mammon.

You don’t have a soul anymore — that’s anachronistic. You have a psyche. It consists of a brain. That brain is neurochemistry. It suffers from chemical imbalances. Syndromes. Disorders.

And everything can be explained now by evolutionary biology. You have a negativity bias — you had to “pay” attention to the lions on the Savannah, otherwise you’d become “a protein snack.”

Evolutionary biology, when used as a totalizing explanation, becomes the grammar of Big Mammon — the grammar of amen.

Your inner landscape? The heart? The soul? The secret hiding place where God dwells? Oh, well, you’re permitted to hold those “beliefs” in private. But don’t you dare bring that language into the public square! Otherwise, you’ll get the label — Bible thumper. Christian nationalist. Whatever. Anything to marginalize you.

god-like technology

Once upon a time, there was a power that claimed us. Called us by name. Said it knew us before we were born, and knows us better than we know ourselves.

Then along came E.O. Wilson — a brilliant man, a kind man who answered my sophomoric questions with grace — who said: “We have Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”

And now an entire generation quotes this as gospel truth. It’s the operating mantra of the Center for Humane Technology and many others.

Except for one thing: it’s a highly contested claim.

Wilson was blind to the remedy: we can rewrite the script. Emotion is co-constructed with language and culture, not locked in DNA alone. Biology is amazingly powerful, but as Annie Crawford has so brilliantly shown, its language is contested and incomplete. The current language of biology cannot possibly be the only permitted grammar.

The Greeks took centuries of myth making to carve out words just for guilt. And countless words cannot be translated, because each language holds unique emotional spaces, as Tim Lomas’ wonderful project shows.

The grammar of Big Mammon locks us into a vocabulary of disorder and deficit, telling us our emotions are fixed, biological, unchangeable. But the tradition — and the science — tell us otherwise. Emotions are co-constructed with language. And if language can be expanded, the interior can be reclaimed.

Emotions were never the problem; they are the frontier. Poverty of language is the problem — and that, unlike our DNA, we can do something about.

We need not resign ourselves to Stone Age hearts. We can expand our language, and what we tend will expand with it.

Rest in peace, Professor Wilson.
n nisi te, Doomine — nothing but you, Doom.

You’re a good man, Andy Crouch. A beloved man. The world needs more people like you. I am grateful for many things, among them, to have walked the earth the same time as you.

Συγχάρητέ μοι — come rejoice with me.

song:
the Algorithm is your Shepherd
YOU SHALL NOT THINK!