For 31 years, I have made words for what each new technology was doing to our souls: first the internet, then social media, then the smartphone, and now artificial intelligence.

Why these words came to me, of all people, I still cannot say. Milton Glaser once told me that the arrival of ideas is a mystery. This page is a record of that mystery.

1995 · Beginning of the Word Wars

I first confronted the raw power of words when the internet was just moving into public awareness. One of the first words I coined in a national journal was “porngeist.” I predicted that the Internet would have a lot of porn. You can read a retrospective here.

1999 · Digital Sabbaths

I was practicing Orthodox Judaism when the Internet came online. It seemed obvious that we would need digital sabbaths and I wrote about them at length.

The same printed edition contains a number of coinages — 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 active in the Garden today, 30 years later:

2003–2004 · Goodbye Gutenberg

In 2004, my wife and I published Goodbye Gutenberg, a 2,000-year journey through the history of illuminated books. Its color theme — and now this Substack — was inspired by the Codex Brixianus. The medieval scribes wrote Scripture in gold on oxblood-colored parchment. Oxblood symbolizes sacrifice, blood, and witness; gold brings the light of revelation. The designs speak before the words are read.

Goodbye Gutenberg won awards from Editor’s Choice, Bookpleasures, and IPPY. Milton Glaser called it “a visual history of the universe.”

2005 · The Illuminated Word

In 2005, long before the new wave of illuminated Bibles, Charlie “Tremendous” Jones published .Christ: the Gospel of Matthew. An imaginary browser showed the Sermon on the Mount playing in a hand-painted media player.

My lifelong dream — shown here in print but still unrealized on the web as of 2026 — is to see grace and peace buttons alongside all the others. Someday, אי״ה

Kind words, and sometimes a meal, came from Zig Ziglar, Paul Meyer, Russell Moore, Mark Sanborn, Mark Victor Hanson, Bob Proctor, and Bill Moyers.

2011 · Thou Art Social

In 2011, the world was celebrating the like button, the endless scroll and the social media glow. In Thou Art Social, I explored its darker side: deal zombies, succumbing birds, and sentimental saps.

At the time, these warnings sounded almost heretical. One of the few kind acknowledgments came from Jaron Lanier, and in those difficult years, when I was weeping in a wheelchair, his note meant the world to me.

2015 · Wellgorithms

I finally found a name for the words, and a new genre was born: wellgorithms. A way of giving each of your inner creatures a name — and, eventually, a face.

Once your inner creatures have names, you can begin to cultivate a relationship with them. And then a commons becomes possible — a place where we can share what we are naming, learn from our tending, and cultivate our interiors together.

By 2020, I had minted more than 5,000 wellgorithms, which we could finally plant, prune, compost and fertilize in the Garden.

Some of the early wellgorithm titles shown here, and still in the Garden today, include Gratitude Gardener, Wellectricity Generator, Anger Gangster, Progress Pollinator, and Stress Blesser.

2021 • the (inner)Verse

In 2021, for the first time, we could “step inside” our metaphors. It was a watershed moment that our culture has not yet fully appreciated. “Metaphors we live by” is now “metaphors we enter.”

Teresa of Ávila and the contemplatives had always known that the soul has rooms, dimensions, and depths. Virtual reality gives us a new way to enter them. But the moment we render an interior, we have to decide what an interior is. Every choice reveals what we believe a human being is. And this is the battleground.

2023 • the Silvanus protocol

In 2023, GPT-4 arrived, and overnight the machine could write a clean paragraph. I went looking for an honest Christian way to use it.

Rock gave me the answer. At the end of his first letter, he wrote: διὰ Σιλουανοῦ—“through Silvanus I have written.” He named the faithful brother who helped him.

That inspired the Silvanus protocol. AI can help with grammar, structure, fluency, and flow. It cannot supply the body, the wound, the love, or the life behind the words.

2025 • Wellgorithm faces

In 2025, after thirty years as words, the wellgorithms finally received their faces. I had the names long before AI, but finally, I could see them. And my biggest thrill is to see how different people create different faces for the same names.

Christian art has always given faces to virtues, vices, grief, mercy, angels, and demons. A face changes our relationship to our interiors. We can recognize it, meet its gaze, and begin to tend it.

2026 • a retrospective

A new alibi is taking hold: “No one knew that social media would fracture our attention, monetize our loneliness, and deform our relationships.”

Some of us knew.

In the 1990s, I warned about the porngeist, the use of data mining to exploit our emotional vulnerabilities, and the need for digital sabbaths.

But I did more than warn. I tried to make the new medium beautiful. Those early illuminated books won readers, prizes, and new publishing offers.

But as social media became ever more popular, I saw clouds of darkness looming. Big Mammon was invading our interiors. I took a lonelier path — warning about the invasion, and building the Garden platform from scratch.

Being ignored was one wound. Being told that nobody knew is another.

I’ve confessed in my songs that I have resentment weeds. I’ve plucked them, prayed over them, composted them. But my Garden also grows love flowers, laughter flowers, gratitude flowers. The weeds don’t define the man.

For years, the gap between what I could imagine and what one wounded gardener could build was too wide. I had the words but not the hands. AI closed that gap. Finally, I could build design, animation, and typographic features that the much larger platforms still do not offer in 2026.

The Garden has been blooming for years. But it is not finished. A garden is never finished. And this one surely will not be finished in our lifetimes.

Luke tells the story of Simeon, who departed in peace because his eyes had seen enough. Just a glimpse of the Divine was enough.

Through the Garden, I’ve had these glimpses. You need not agree that Big Mammon is the name of the enemy. You need not accept my account of modernity, psychology, or theology. But I hope this much has become clear:

the language of our interiors is a hotly contested space — perhaps the most contested.

AI is not neutral.

AI ranks, restricts, reinforces, and normalizes particular vocabularies.

AI makes some words for human life easy and others hard to imagine.

If the Garden has made this struggle visible — and shown why we urgently need a naming and cultivation commons — it has done its duty.

I am blessed with a loving wife, a beautiful church, friendship, fellowship. When my hour comes, let the record bear this witness: I died a grateful man, with love in my heart, having experienced — in this wounded life — the fullness of God.

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 be given time to see sacred things bloom.

When your own hour comes, may you depart in peace. Until then, may you never forget: you are loved, and never alone in the tending.

Layer upon layer of compost.

I was four years old. My father would make me lie on my back, raise my shirt, and whip my stomach with his belt. Over and over until I couldn’t breathe. The gastric troubles I carry to this day are how my body still remembers. That was the first layer.

I ran away many times. I slept in abandoned buildings in the inlet section of Atlantic City. My brother — my best friend and bunkmate for the first 12 years of my life — committed suicide. The family was not shelter. The family was torture.

That was the second layer, pressed down on the first.

But there was a refuge: the synagogue. I was a Levite, honored with special Torah readings, in services conducted mostly in Hebrew. When I heard the stories of the prophets — Jeremiah, Elijah, Isaiah — I wept. They had been broken too. I was not alone in my pain, I was part of a long tradition. That was the third layer.

Homeless, with no money for university, I served as a private in the Army during the Gulf War, in the 11^th ACR under the good command of A.J. Bacevich. Lowest rank. Most expendable. I learned what it means to submit to authority, to serve a community larger than myself. That was the fourth layer.

A small-town boy with a love of nature, I swore I’d never live or work in a big city. But then I met a beautiful woman, a public school teacher in the South Bronx. So I moved to New York, took up graphic design, and was lucky enough to be mentored by Milton Glaser and to brainstorm early versions of the Garden with George Lois.

That was the fifth layer. And it was golden. I had great friends and was rubbing shoulders with giants. I was friends with protégés of Martin Buber, Erich Fromm, and Rheinhold Niehbur. I was young, and in love, and beaming with hope. It was time to plant.

Then my body failed. Toxic mold. Lyme disease. Immune system collapse. I dropped to 112 pounds. I remember the whites in the doctors’ eyes when they looked at me sitting in a wheelchair, looked sadly at my test results, and told me to prepare my will.

As a last ditch effort, they gave me over four hundred infusions, including intravenous immunoglobulins, which four times the insurance companies refused to pay for. I camped out in their offices, hours each day, and created wellgorithms during the infusions.

Somehow, slowly, over six years, I healed enough to walk again. That was the sixth layer.

Grateful just to be alive, I brought the Garden to everyone I could find — thought leaders, podcasters, academics, investors, anyone who would listen. Day after day, year after year, in kindness and humility, I reached out. What I received was scorn. Derision. Dismissals. “That language is crazy,” they said. “Nobody is interested in a new language.”

This was the seventh layer.

Something happens to you when you are rejected for so long. Like a wet sponge, it squeezes your ego dry. It teaches you the art of dying to yourself. And if you are in a state of radical openness, Grace comes knocking. For me, it was a moment when, forbidden from mentioning Yeshua at the family table, I took up the Gospels and began to read.

I read and read ... and wept and wept ... because here at last were my people. One man heard of my story and responded with love and kindness and became my life’s mentor — Charlie “Tremendous” Jones.

One of America’s great humorists and motivational speakers, Charlie took me under his wing. He sent me first to Word of Life for intense Bible study, then loaded up my library with devotionals from Spurgeon, Chambers, Fenelon, and many others.

I joined a church and learned to pray in community. These years were the most heart-warming of my life. But then came the political polarizations, covid, and societal fractures. I was an active member of a Methodist Church during the years when they split, and it broke my heart. Christians fighting Christians. It just breaks me.

That was the eighth layer. The ninth layer, putting it all together, is the words.

Looking back, I see now what I couldn’t name then: I had lost my verbal agency. People tried to help me — counselors, friends, family, real love among them — but almost everyone reached for a label. They pigeonholed my suffering in the language of the DSM, and even sent me to a psychiatrist because for the first two years they couldn’t find the illness in my blood. I was sick, weak, in constant pain, in a wheelchair, with no strength left to resist.

During the infusions, I had an epiphany: if we are going to heal, we will have partake in the naming. The authority to name what stirs inside a soul was never meant to live only in the institution, the instrument, the pedigree — it belongs also to the ones who suffer. The oldest human work was to name the creatures. The wild sparks inside us are creatures too, and most of them have never been named.

Every day the machine takes a little more of our freedom — thinking, naming and deciding for us. Urgently, urgently: we need technologies of agency. And agency starts with the words you choose. That’s what I set out to build: not a tool that promises you the kingdom, but one that gives you the keys.

I’m now in my 31st year tending the Garden. I’m still planting seeds, composting weeds, and sprouting with whatever strength I have left. My beloved wife, who just retired after teaching underserved children for 33 years, stood by me all these years. Each day, I give thanks for having someone to love and something to hope for.

Grace looks at our sufferings and sees soil. There’s beauty in the ashes. May you find the beauty.

wounds into wildflowers:
a song in blues

When Benjamin Franklin began studying electricity, people could feel the spark and the shock. But they had few words for what was happening. So Franklin gave the force a family of names:

Charge.
Conductor.
Battery.
Positive.
Negative.

The names made electricity thinkable, workable, livable.

Before the names, electricity was something that happened to you.
After the names, electricity became something you could work with.

We are living through another shock now.

AI is electrifying our schools, our work, our relationships, our art, our attention. But it is also electrifying our interiors — speeding us up, numbing us, naming us, drawing off things we do not always get back.

And we have very few words for what is happening inside us.

Happy.
Optimistic.
Anxious.
Depressed.
Lonely.

The electricity analogy only gets us partway.

You carry within you about 38 trillion bacteria, most of them in your gut, participating in a vast chemical conversation with your body. You also carry 86 billion neurons joined in an almost unimaginably intricate web. None of this explains the mystery of a person. It only hints at the staggering scale of the life moving within you.

And to describe that vast, churning, particular interior, Big Mammon tells us to reach for the same few words.

Imagine sending a naturalist into the Amazon and receiving a field report with one category:

Small things.

That is roughly the resolution at which we perceive our own interiors.

We have named millions of things beyond us — species, stars, minerals, galaxies. Yet for the country closest to us, the one we inhabit every waking hour, we have a handful of worn words. Many were supplied by clinics, labs, platforms and machines.

We need a Linnaeus of the interior. But instead of some rare genius doing it all, a commons, a democreacy — where each of us, as fleshient creatures, can participate in the naming.

That is the gap a wellgorithm fills.

A wellgorithm, in seed form, is a new word — and often a face — for something moving inside you.

Jackie might name one of her inner creatures anxiety∫Ice. Her anxiety feels cold, paralyzing, lonely.

Reid might call his anxiety∫Fire. His burns hot — energetic, urgent, dangerously uncomfortable.

This is what scientists call emotional granularity — naming emotions with greater precision. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work shows that one broad word — anxiety — can point to very different creatures. The more precisely you name them, the more agency you have in tending them.

anxiety∫Ice may need warmth and companionship.

anxiety∫Fire may need cooling, space, or a safe channel for its energy.

Words are organs of perception. New words increase contrast. Contrast increases perception. Perception increases agency. Agency increases what you can do.

Words are power. They change what you can see. They make the defaults, the biases, the hidden assumptions of our culture visible.

That’s why Big Mammon seized control of our words. You want to get help, you want to bill the insurance, you want to get paid — use Big Mammon’s words.

~

Once your inner creatures have names, you enter into a relationship with them. You can tend them — plant, pollinate, compost, mulch, fertilize. That’s when a name becomes a wellgorithm — a living practice for cultivating your soul like a garden.

You can share a wellgorithm with a friend. You can animate your words. You can make songs with them. You can interact with them in 3D.

You can even graft the wellgorithm seeds and weeds of other gardeners — borrow their raw materials, a word, a face, and take them in a new direction.

Franklin gave us words for the outer currents. Wellgorithms give us words for the inner currents.

These are strange times. We need a language strange enough, precise enough, and human enough to meet them.

one Garden. two gates.

There are two kinds of wellgorithms.

Grace wellgorithms are grounded in Scripture. They say God, Christ, and the Spirit out loud. They continue the work of the saints, mystics, and desert monks who spent two thousand years naming the movements of the soul.

Nature wellgorithms speak in the common language of human experience. They are for anyone with a body and a wound — the agnostic, the seeker, the doomscroller, the friend of another faith or none. They ask nothing of you but honesty.

These are not two rival truths.

They are two registers for approaching the same mysterious interior: one through experiences we may recognize across our differences, the other in the particular light of Christian faith.

With each wellgorithm you create, you decide whether it goes in the Grace plots or the Nature plots.

There is no neutral language — and this is the sham of Big Mammon.

It makes words such as dignity, ethics, freedom, and agency sound neutral. But their meanings depend upon what we believe a human being is, where we came from, and what we are here for.

So here is what I believe: that the world is Creation, that every human being bears the image of God, that our powers of naming and making are gifts, and that the deepest healing of human nature is found in the grace of God.

Grace perfects nature — gratia perficit naturam. This is my confession. But I will not place it in your mouth.

The more I grow in my faith, the wider I open the door. The Garden is built in the spirit of φιλοξενία — philoxenia, the love of the stranger. That means you are welcome exactly as you are. You are not my conversion project.

Faith means something only when it is freely given. In the Garden, you are never forced. Your heart remains free.

Rock says to “love the stranger without grumbling” — ἄνευ γογγυσμοῦ.

Gongysmos is one of my favorite words. In Greek, gong-goos-moo sounds like a crowd mumbling under its breath.

So, whenever a stranger gets on my nerves — you, for example — I just say

gong-goos-moo
gong-goos-moo

68,000 times, until I feel better or drop dead.

The Garden offers you tools for naming your inner creatures — with a wink, a smile, and a heart full of love and hope — and then steps back. You can take a word, question it, change it, plant it in your own language, or leave it where you found it.

That is hospitality. That is freedom.

As Paul says, if we have any complaints against each other, lavish grace freely, graciously on each other — χαριζόμενοι — just as God in Christ lavishes grace freely, graciously on us.

The English translations often gloss this over and call it “forgiveness.” It comes out so bland in English. In Greek, Paul uses the root word for Grace and tells us to “lavish grace freely.” Different energy. More exuberant.

Big Mammon lavishes labels. It installs its names with dry, clinical, white-coat, stock-photo seriousness — without asking your permission. It defines you. Labels you. Categorizes you. Sells you to the highest bidder in an invisible market.

Big Mammon knows the rule:
GIGO — Grammar In, Grammar Out.

And if your grammar is garbage, your culture will be garbage, too. This is the word stench we awaken to each morning — doomscrolling, cognitive surrender, workslop, meaning-maxxing. This is the stinky language of Big Mammon.

~

the naming stays human

One line governs everything here:

The machine does not name your inner creatures for you.

AI can help you give a word a face. It can help animate the word, set hand-written lyrics to music, or carry your vision into forms you could not build alone. When AI helps, we say so openly under the Silvanus protocol.

But the first naming belongs to the person with the body — the one who is fleshient. The one carrying the wound. I may coin a name and offer it to you. But no name becomes yours until you recognize it and say:

“That. That is what I am experiencing.”

~

Some wellgorithms are seeds. Some are weeds. Some are mulch. Some are worms.

Worms are the humor wellgorithms. They may be the most important creatures in the Garden. As Chesterton said “Angels can fart because they can take themselves lightly.” Well, he didn’t really say that. But he should have.

Bonhoeffer warned Christians against cheap grace. I would add another phrase — playful grace.

Playful grace asks everything of us — confession, change, patience, courage, forgiveness — but refuses to believe that holiness must be humorless.

It is grace with dirt beneath its fingernails.

Grace that laughs with the worms.

“The best Christian theology has always understood love to be the fullest liberation and has found love best exemplified in play.”
— Alan Jacobs