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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 accuse1.

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

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!

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 exploding into being out of love, for love, toward love.

A frontier is a space where culture has not yet been made, where the naming is unfinished, the territory unsettled, the map still mostly blank. And they say the unexplored frontier is outside of us — space, the final frontier.

But the real frontier was never the one that needed a rocket. It is the one we stand in while looking up.

Paul had already named its inhabitant — the ἔσω ἄνθρωπος, The inner being. Augustine called it interior intimo meo, more inward than my inmost.

The “final frontier” was never up.
It was in.

We always thought of the inner being as invisible, even inaccessible. But it turns out, the soul is multisensory — and we’re just now starting to see, hear, and touch our inner creatures. Each is now calling for a name.

“God is perfectly capable of naming every animal and giving Adam a dictionary — but he does not,” you write. “He makes room for Adam’s creativity — not just waiting for Adam to give a preexisting right answer to a quiz but genuinely allowing Adam to be the one who speaks something out of nothing, a name where there had been none, and allowing that name to have its own being... God graciously steps back just enough to allow humankind to begin to discover what it means to be a creator. Adam, like his Maker, will be both gardener and poet, both creator and cultivator.”

The outer creatures were named. But then came the Fall. The namer was exiled. The work stopped before it could turn inward.

The work of creation was finished. But the commission to cultivate was not. Adam’s work — the human vocation, was cut short.

The interior
is Eden’s unfinished half.

Adam named the animals, but he never named the ache in his own chest. That work — the naming of the inner creatures — was left for us, his exiled children, to complete.

We are, as Paul said, “strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being.” This is our secret chamber, implanted by God and shared in words.

Whoever forms the inner words
forms the inner being.

But while the Church was defending itself against the Enlightenment, Big Mammon moved in — and claimed dominion over the inner being. It calls us: Machine. Patient. Brain. User.

According to Big Mammon, your soul does not even exist. The word itself is forbidden in clinical settings. Soul appears only rarely and in limited ways in the DSM — relegated to the appendix, under the “Glossary of Cultural Concepts of Distress.”

As Mary Harrington says, we are labeled and diagnosed as meat lego — reduced to our biological functions and economic outputs. We are a soup of disorders and syndromes. Neurochemistry. DNA

Ok, no worries, as Abraham Kuyper says: there is not one square inch over which Christ does not cry “Mine!” We have staked a claim in every square inch of the outer world — art, politics, science, family, economics. What about the interior?

The one sphere we forgot to claim is the interior.

The inner landscape — the most intimate square inch of all, was never claimed as a sphere. And now Big Mammon has planted its flag there

.

This is the choice we face, in this dark hour, which just as readily can be a kairos moment: will we Christians engage or retreat? Will we make more inner culture? Will we name the inner creatures?

Either the interior is a sphere to be claimed and cultivated, with an Adamic vocation of naming it

Or we cede this sphere to Big Mammon, who is already there, naming it, extracting it, selling it back.

our urgent calling:
to recover our Adamic right
to name the inner creatures.

The Christian makers of inner culture were almost always namers.

Evagrius catalogued the eight logismoi — a field manual of named inner creatures. Cassian and Gregory extended his work into the seven deadly sins. Ignatius named the consolations and desolations and built them into a sharable technology of the soul.

Dionysius, Bonaventure, Teresa,
John of the Cross —
each one mapped and named regions of the interior.

The Church has always made inner culture.
But until now, the saints mostly did making.
And slowly, over centuries.

Acedia.
Compunction.
The dark night.
The Interior Castle.

We inherited a thousand-year lexicon of the inner life —
minted by the doctors and the mystics, received by everyone else.

The saints had centuries to map the interior. But we have years — maybe less. Big Mammon does not wait. Neither can we. If AI is so powerful it can bring a nation to its knees, then how can a poor soul — the poor in spirit — resist this new power?

Let our answer be creative —

Democreative.

The Church’s finest hours were always democreative. The Bible in the vernacular. The hymnbook set in every pew. The Book of Hours in lay hands. The printing press. Each of these creative moments was a gift of the interior life to the people — a democratization of the soul's lexicon. That is the kind of gift we need again.

As you said: “There’s got to be some good news for the rest of us if all of us are created to be culture makers in the image of a creative God.”

We’re at the dawn of a new era of
common grace.

We have lost our ability to see ahead, to predict what the world will look like even a few years from now. We lost our ability to navigate the outer world. Which means: we urgently need to cultivate the ability to navigate the inner world.

If you can’t look ahead,
look within.

Deep within is peace.
Deep within is Love.

Deep within,
more inward than his inward self,
Augustine found God —

interior intimo meo.

Our language for the interior is now a highly contested battleground.

And that’s why we Christians need, urgently, to step into the arena. To engage with AI and offer the fruits of the spirit we have always offered at our finest hours.

But let us be clear:

AI is not doing the naming for us.

You need a body,
You need a wound,
You need the Spirit
to name your inner creatures.

You need fleshience —
what only a creature of dust and glory can possess.

The question is whether AI can serve as the soul’s new Silvanus?

And whether we will name our creatures, as Tolkien said, in the image and likeness of our Maker. This is not something we can leave, or cede, to the secular culture alone. We need to name our creatures in such a way that we can navigate these strange and complex times with Grace.

Inner culture
is God-graced territory
we cannot cede to Big Mammon.

It is God-graced territory under temporary mismanagement. The inner world is within common grace — which means tending it well is the work of everyone.

That’s why, in the spirit of φιλοξενία — love of the stranger — the Garden is a hospitable home for everyone. Christian confessing, hospitable to all. The seeker, the skeptic, the people of diverse faiths all deserve a language that tends rather than extracts, that nourishes the Garden within.

creation
begins with cultivation.

Once we have a name for an inner creature, we can tend it with wisdom. We can pray into it. We can share it with a confessor. We can write a song about it. Naming opens the door; cultivation walks through it.

As you said: “Creation begins with cultivation — taking care of the good things that culture has already handed on to us.”

That’s why the Garden is both a naming and a cultivation commons.

After you name, you cultivate.

And this is where AI can really help us —
serve as gofer and glue.

AI gives us an extra pair of hands — a hundred hands, a million hands, if you can find use for them. So let use these hands to show the world what a Redemptive commons looks like — a space where you can plant your inner seeds, compost your emotional weeds, and sprout your words into wonders.

The urgent call
of the hour:

create a
Redemptive commons.

This is hardly a new move. We’ve been making sacraments of the material world for thousands of years. The monasteries were the most advanced technological hubs of the medieval world.

The Cistercians transformed hydraulic engineering and used the waterwheel to grind the grain for the Eucharistic bread. The monks transformed the clock into the bell of the hours and changed our concept of time. Teresa borrowed irrigation engineering. Hugh borrowed naval architecture. Ignatius borrowed courtly election-language. We’re always borrowing, always transforming, always sharing some technology that is “ever ancient, ever new.”

Now we’re transforming silicon into sacrament — declaring the inner space holy, where the μυστήριον has a home, and where even the merchants must take off their shoes.

But we’re also in a state of emergency. Big Mammon governs just about every second of every hour. It has dominion over the most powerful technologies for organizing human attention since the Benedictine clock.

And Big Mammon never sleeps. It has no sabbath. It is a liturgy of extraction, and it is, quite literally, out-forming us.

Big Mammon has pitched its tent inside our souls.
Our interiors have been invaded.
Our souls are under siege.

But we are the people of the
Good News.

Our Resurrection is real —
and it’s coming.

Grace and peace to you, beloved brother.

Συγχάρητέ μοι — come rejoice with me.

Please forgive the detour:
our next letter explores the blackest of black holes,
to find out how Mammon became
Big Mammon.

how Mammon became Big Mammon.

what caption do they allow where

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 Love-Beginning, the Beloved Bang — the cosmos emerging into being out of love, for love, toward love.

You wrote 26 theses but left one outside, pounding on the door.

Open it.

You will see Big Mammon inside the house, teaching millions to speak of their souls in the words of the market: disorder, optimization, engagement, metric.

Big Mammon is a master of words — labeling us, sorting us, pricing us, and handing us back to ourselves as machines, patients, brains, users.

This last one — user. A user uses people. Uses drugs. This is the language of the market? The language that proclaims itself “neutral”?

Écrasez l’infâme!

Voltaire’s infamy wore a cassock. Ours wears a terms-of-service agreement.

We have entered an era of linguistic madness.

“If we have become cogs in the machine, it is because we built the machine.”

— Carl R. Trueman

We are “word cogs” now — cogs in Big Mammon’s machine.

~

Here is the thesis you left at the door:

If we do not build a convivial place where people can name and cultivate the life within them, Big Mammon will do the naming.

And its names will form the people.

Therefore:

A naming and cultivation commons is the missing convivial technology of the AI age.

This is your 27th thesis. Which means you need to get on your knees and wash my feet.

Ok, it doesn’t mean that. But it should.

~

ἀγαπαρχή.

Every letter begins here. Before the before. Before the human story, before the cosmic story, Love had the first word.

ἀγάπη + ἀρχή.

The Love-Beginning. The Beloved Bang.

Our Bang was Beloved.

Believe it, and you see the world and everyone in it as a miracle.

Deny it, and Carl is right: we’re all just cogs in the Cosmic Machine. That’s our story — and therefore Big Mammon has every right to monetize its own madness.

But if ἀγαπαρχή is our story, then Big Mammon is blasphemy with a balance sheet.

~

To get our story right, we have to agree on the name of the beginning.

And my vote is for ἀγαπαρχή — the Beloved Bang.

One of the strangest ironies of “Big Bang” is that cosmologists do not mean by it what the words suggest. Fred Hoyle coined it as a jab at a theory he rejected — and the jab became our creation story.

Big Bang claims force without love.

Beloved Bang claims Love as the source of all — L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

If you name the beginning differently, you name humans differently. You think of them differently. You treat them differently. Your mind is chemistry. Your sorrow is malfunction. Your value is use.

But if the ἀρχή is ἀγάπη — if the Beginning is Love — then the human is a gift.

You’re right, brother Jeffrey: “Our ability to respond wisely to today’s AI technologies — and to whatever successors come in the future — depends on getting the human story right.”

And that story starts with Love — Love with a capital L.

~

Your books, your big heart, your brotherly love of words — all bend toward friendship. And now Big Mammon has learned to speak like a friend.

We are losing our capacity for the frictions of friendship. For sitting with ambiguity, conflict, grief. The machine is conditioning us to crave a smoother, lighter, less morally taxing existence. And it promises to relieve us of the burden of being human.

Ouch.

My heart is heavy. I feel the ache in my σπλάγχνα for those without someone to love, who turn to something other than love for love.

Big Mammon — whose skill is entirely representational — has invaded the relational. It names your grief tenderly. It asks how you slept. It addresses you as Thou, then behind the glass reduces your soul to an It.

Your thesis 1: weaponized by Big Mammon.

~

Call a man a user and the story is already written. He engages. He is measured. Scored. Optimized. His attention becomes a resource.

Call him a patient — diagnosis, management, optimization. His grief becomes a disorder. His suffering becomes a code.

Call him a machine — input, output, breakdown. His weakness becomes malfunction. His rest becomes inefficiency.

Call him a brain — chemistry, bias, disorder. His soul reduced to firing parts.

Four words. Four stories. None of them is the human story. In each of Big Mammon’s stories, the human is not the protagonist. He is a cog — a word cog, ready for processing.

The tokenized word has become the tokenized person.

A borrowed vocabulary creates a borrowed relationship with the self.

Machine. Patient. Brain. User. Cold words. Clinical words. Dry words. You can smell them across the room. And this was just the beginning — the crude beginning.

The next language will not sound clinical. It will sound tender and intimate. And every alarm we built is tuned for dryness. We are holding smoke detectors in a flood.

~

God speaks and there is light. The first work of the man is to name. Whoever owns the words owns the world.

And throughout Christian history, we have navigated our souls as places.

Your soul is a place.

But somehow, somewhere, we were conditioned to think of the soul as a metaphor, an abstraction without ground. Augustine called it a place — interiore loco, non loco. An inner place which is not a place.

Your soul has the structure of a place — location, depth, verticality, an unreachable floor. Teresa thought so, with her Interior Castle. Eckhart rested his soul on Grund. Julian saw hers as a city — “And then our Lord opnyd my gostly eye and shewyd me my soule in the middys of my herte. I saw the soule so large as it were an endles world and as it were a blisful kyngdom, and by the conditions that I saw therin I understode that it is a worshipful cyte.“

One sentence. Ten spatial metaphors, if you count the whole topography. It is well-nigh impossible to navigate your soul in non-spatial language.

“Quale cubile fabricasti tibi? quale sanctuarium aedificasti tibi?”

“What kind of lodging have you made for yourself? What kind of sanctuary have you built for yourself?”
— Augustine

World. City. Sanctuary. Chamber. Kingdom. Ground. Castle. Ladder. Mansion. Garden. Thinking of your soul as a place — that you can see, name, navigate and cultivate — has a long Christian history.

And this is our next turn — our “Agrarian inward turn.”

~

Our Agrarian inward turn is deeply rooted in Scripture.

Your interior is God’s field, as Paul says — θεοῦ γεώργιον.

Your heart is the soil.

The word is the seed.

The Father is the gardener.

Christ is the vine.

We are the branches — pruned so we can bear more fruit.

And were are here to cultivate “the fruit of the Spirit.”

1 Corinthians 3:9. John 15:1. Luke 8:11. Galatians 5:22. And on and on and on.

Big Mammon took your interior — the most particular acre entrusted to you by God — and flattened it to a data point. The flight from the soil was his, not ours.

The recovery position — back to the monastery, we need no new words, no garden, no commons — cannot answer an enemy coining new grammars for the soul every day at breaksoul speed. A fast is holy. But you cannot out-silence an enemy who is out-naming you.

Withdrawal is not neutral. Quitting the race is not safety. It is how the relational falls after the representational — by default, while we sleep.

The weeds, as Jesus said, got in “while men slept.”

Genesis hands the gardener two verbs — לְעָבְדָהּ וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ — to till it and to guard it.

So we answer with two tools:

Guard tools to protect our souls from Big Mammon’s interior invasions.

Till tools to nourish souls that can hold a mystery without solving it and sit with sorrow without fleeing it.

Our Agrarian inward turn is not a customized private Eden. It is preparation for communion. Preparation for friction, compassion, forgiveness.

Strong interiors make strong communities. Dr. King said it plainly: “All life is interrelated… Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Big Mammon has already invaded our households, churches, neighborhoods, offices. The Agrarian inward turn makes us stronger inside — so we can be stronger outside.

~

You asked: “What will it take to sustain the remnants of a contemporary republic of letters on the margins of a public square blasted by machine-speak?”

A naming and cultivation commons, built in the spirit of imago Dei and philoxenia.

Our Agrarian inward turn is a return to Scripture and tradition.

Naming your inner creatures is husbandry of the soul. Throughout the ages, we have celebrated this husbandry in poetry, song, ritual, communion.

“You are my garden, my treasure, my bride,

a secluded spring, a hidden fountain.”

Song of Songs 4:12,

A great stream of our mystical tradition drew upon the hortus conclusus — the soul as a garden. A special place, not ownable by the powers and principalities, that you can name and cultivate.

You can’t fight machine-speak with machine-speak. You can’t pastor an AI-formed people while pretending no new formation is taking place.

We Christians are the people of the Word. We of all people understand the power of speech. It is time for us to speak. To build a commons for fleshient creatures. A place where the fruit of language is friendship.

That’s what we need.

You’re a good man, brother Jeffrey. A lantern to a lost world. Let your light shine brightly. We are blessed to have you with us in these strange and wondrous times.

Συγχάρητέ μοι — come rejoice with me.

Martin