Beloved sister Catherine, ἀγαπητή —
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 exploding into being out of love, for love, toward love.
The question I asked you back in March is the same question I have been asking, in one form or another, for 31 years: can technology expand our capacity for Love?
Maybe I spent too much time in tech. Maybe I bought into its PR for too long. But the tech bros keep telling us, “With AI you can be and do anything,” and I keep saying, “Then let us expand our capacity for Love. Our capax Agape.”
And if we are going to expand our capax Agape, we first have to expand our language.
That, in a nutshell, is my life’s work.
But Houston, we have a problem.
Big Mammon has its own expansion plans — and not for Agape.
Big Mammon, amplified by social media and AI, has turned the postmodern crisis of language into an industrial operation.
Postmodernism already taught that meaning is unstable, that every sign is suspicious, that no final truth can be trusted. Big Mammon took that diagnosis and made it a business model. It floods our interiors with reductive codes, metrics, and labels until we can no longer name what is moving inside us with any Grace or dignity.
We are in the midst of “a twisting and foreclosing of language,” as you say. And shamelessly, Big Mammon is separating us from God’s Love — in what may be the most brutal assault on Romans 8:38 in two thousand years.
Paul was convinced that nothing — “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow — not even the powers of Hell can separate us from God’s Love.”
Paul calls it χωρίσαι — to separate. To sever. To create a gap between two things that belong together. It is the mechanism of every power that opposes the human person’s participation in Divine life.
Big Mammon is a χωρισμός machine. A separation engine. Its genius is that it does not need you to stop believing in God’s Love. It only needs to keep you from partaking of it. It inserts enough χώρα — enough space, noise, distraction, anxiety, comparison, dopamine loop, algorithmic stimulation — that the Love which is always present cannot be received.
God’s signal is ever-present. But Big Mammon is jamming our receivers.
Every day, more of us struggle to trust our own inner signals — “the still small voice” — because Big Mammon has already named, forecasted, modeled and mediated us better than we can mediate ourselves.
And once language is captured, everything downstream follows: what can be thought, seen, said, shared, and even imagined.
Call the wound a disorder and the clinic owns it.
Call it chemistry and the lab owns it.
Call it data and Big Mammon owns it.
The name decides what the eye can see. The metaphor decides whether we reach for a pill, a prayer, a protest, a shovel, or a hand. The grammar decides the framing of the ultimate question, What is a human being?
Everything
is downstream of language.
Big Mammon wants money.
It wants words.
It wants to install a rival grammar inside the soul.
Machine.
Patient.
Brain.
User.
Train AI inside these old grammars and give them a billion mouths. The grammar becomes atmosphere. The name starts to feel like fate.
Your writings explore how modernity has forced apart the real, the historical, and the fictional, and offer an extraordinary phrase: “outwit the separation.”
We are called in this dark hour to outwit Big Mammon’s separations.
We outwit Big Mammon’s separations through language — a new language. A “restoration of the Adamic power of words” — this time, the power to name our inner creatures.
For that, we need a new medium — a doxological medium.
~
“Modern poets, artists and musicians often observe the sense that their task is to renew a language and culture that has become decadent by losing the inherent connection of symbol with reality.”
— Catherine Pickstock
“Especially for a culture that prides itself on the majesty, history, flexibility, and poetry of its great language. English has more words than any language in the history of humanity, but we really dropped the ball on words for love.”
— Rainn Wilson
We have spent nearly three hundred years naming the outer world with astonishing precision. The 2025 Catalogue of Life lists 2,238,246 named living species, with thousands more added every year.
Then we turn inward and ask:
Happy?
Sad?
Mad?
Scared?
We have millions of names for the outer creatures and perhaps 40 words commonly used for the inner ones. A naming gap of roughly 55,000 to one.
We have named the birds in our backyards more carefully than the creatures in our own bowels.
And now we are building machines to speak with us about the soul — in this terribly impoverished language. But Big Mammon speaks the old language with such overflowing confidence that the young and the wounded have little fleshient ground to stand on.
~
If the limits of our language are the limits of our world, as Wittgenstein says, expanding our language expands our world.
I started developing the Garden lexicon 31 years ago with my first coinage — porngeist, to forewarn of the coming epidemic of online porn — and have been coining ever since.
We currently have over 10,000 new coinages live in the Garden, and have created a blueprint for scaling to 1,000,000 or more.
The immensity is only vertigo if you are trying to hold it. It is glory if you are praising it. “O the immense riches of the wisdom of God!” exclaimed Paul. Ὦ βάθος πλούτου.
John Milbank wrote of the “inexhaustible plenitude” of the Good and you have written of the “surplus of matter” that overflows every container the closed system builds to hold it.
Here are a few Love coinages from the Garden. They are titles of wellgorithms. We use them as nouns and verbs.
Graft them. Compost them. Fertilize them as you wish. They are not dictionary definitions, and they are not definitive. They are invitations.
~
Agapotonin
Invitation
Stretch out your love, let it reach the stranger, and refuse the urge to retreat into petty judgements.
Inspiration
1 Rock 4:8 — ἐκτενῆ ἀγάπην — “Keep your love for one another at full stretch.” Literally, stretched-out love.
Midrash
Agapotonin is a spirit tonic. It tones the heart, tones the soul, tones the spirit the way a good stretch tones a muscle.
Science: tonus — the sustained tension a muscle holds at rest.
~
Agaphorins
Invitation
Lighten your burdens, take up the easy yoke, and beam a sacred light to the person standing in front of you.
Inspiration
Matthew 11:30 — τὸ φορτίον μου ἐλαφρόν — “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Midrash
Agaphorins are the light cargo of the soul. They move through your hands, your voice, your eyes. Be a beautiful presence until the weight that was crushing someone else becomes bearable.
Science:
φορτίον means a load that is carried. In living systems, a load carried in the right way keeps the organism alive; the wrong load — or the same load carried without Grace — crushes it.
~
Agapicles
Invitation
Share even the tiniest fragments of love, gather what is left, and refuse to let any scrap of mercy go to waste.
Inspiration
John 6:12 — κλάσματα — “Gather the fragments left over, that nothing be lost.”
Midrash
Agapicles are the little fragments of Love. The smallest bits that carry the whole. Nothing is too small. Nothing is too broken to matter. The fragments feed the next person.
Science
A synaptic vesicle carries a tiny packet of chemical signal to the edge of a nerve cell. It fuses with the membrane. The signal crosses the gap.
~
Agaplasm
Invitation
Supercharge your love, let it become the living medium that flows between souls, and trust it to help form what only God can fully shape.
Inspiration
Romans 9:20 — τὸ πλάσμα τῷ πλάσαντι — “Shall the formed thing say to the One who formed it, Why have you made me like this?”
Midrash
Agaplasm is the living medium of Love. It fills the space between us the way plasma fills the space between blood cells. Everything that needs to move between souls travels in it.
Science
Plasma is the living fluid matrix of the blood. Cells remain suspended in it. Nutrients, signals, hormones, and life itself move through it. Without the plasma the cells cannot live; without the cells the plasma has nothing to carry. The medium and the formed things need each other.
~
Agapites
Invitation
Let yourself be formed by Love, like a precious gem, a crystal of the living Christ.
Inspiration
1 John 4:7 — Ἀγαπητοί, ἀγαπῶμεν ἀλλήλους — “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.”
Midrash
Agapites are living crystals formed by Love. The Love presses outward through their hands, voice, and presence. Being loved and loving become one continuous substance.
Science
The suffix -ite names a mineral or a member of a group formed from a common source. Agapites are the ones formed by Agape itself — the living stones in whom the original Love has crystallized and now shines.
~
Agaplankton
Invitation
Swim together in the sea of Love, flow with the current, and let it carry you back to the Shepherd who never lost sight of you.
Inspiration
1 Rock 2:25 — πλανώμενοι — “You were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.”
Midrash
Agaplankton are the countless small lives held and carried together in the vast current of Christ’s Love. We are the wandering ones, suspended in a medium we did not make and need not swim against. The medium itself is Love, and it is already bringing us home.
Science
Plankton comes from πλαγκτόν — the wandering ones. They are the suspended multitude that cannot swim against the current and so are carried by it. They form the base of vast aquatic food webs. Everything larger lives because they are held.
~
Agapheromones
Invitation
Carry the message of unconditional Love. Let it move between you and the one beside you until both of you are changed by what passes.
Inspiration
2 Rock 1:21 — πνεύματος ἁγίου φερόμενοι — “Carried by the Holy Spirit, they spoke.” From φέρειν, to carry.
Midrash
Agapheromones are Spirit-carried messages of Love. They move from one member of the Body to another the way a scent moves through air.
Science
A pheromone is a chemical signal released by one individual and received by another, producing a change without words. The signal travels. The receiver is altered.
~
Agapioids
Invitation
Receive every form of Love. Let it enter the wounded places and change the way you carry the pain.
Inspiration
Luke 3:22 — σωματικῷ εἴδει — “the Holy Spirit in bodily form like a dove.”
Midrash
Agapioids are Love taking form and coming toward you. The Spirit took bodily shape and descended like a dove. The same motion continues: Agape keeps arriving in forms you can actually receive, settling into the exact places that have been waiting to be loved.
Science
The ending -oid means “having the form of.” Opioids fit receptors the body already has. Endorphins are the body’s own version. Agapioids work the same way: the form of Love meets a receptor that was already prepared for it.
~
more in the Agape series
Agaplexins
Agapions
Agaptides
Agapostasis
Agapomeno
Agapalypse
Agapomers
Agapergons
Agapodesmos
Agape∫A3
some Greek adventures
ὑπεραγάπη
μεταγάπη
πρωταγάπη
παραγάπη
κεναγάπη
συναγάπη
ἐναγάπη
πνευμαγάπη
τελαγάπη
χαραγάπη
ὁλαγάπη
~
“When linguistic alchemy is linked with the transfiguring body of Christ, we participate by constructive anticipation in the eventual eschatological restoration of the Adamic power of words as fully creative: bringing nature further to be, because these words are poetically lured by nature herself into the full light of ideality.”
— Catherine Pickstock
“Refreshed speech opens a symbolic space for fresh actions”
— Catherine Pickstock
The Agape series names what moves between people. You cannot practice an agapheron wellgorithm alone. You cannot partake of agaplasm alone.
The words fulfill their meanings in the doing. They guide you to a neighbor, a friend, a stranger in need.
The invisible God becomes visible in the circulation — in what passes between us. By this everyone will know you are mine, if you have love one for another.
Christianity has long made and remade theological language. Science has long built families of Greek-derived technical terms. We are bringing those practices together in a family of new Christian English compounds. Scientific word-forms, New Testament Greek, spiritual revelation, and communal practice meet in a new medium of doxology.
The names arrive as both gift and task. They exist so that a commons can form — a place where the movement of the Spirit between us can be tended, amplified, and turned into shared praise.
Linnaeus named the outer creatures. We are naming the inner creatures.
~
“The poetic is only secure in the poetic event of the Incarnation.”
— Catherine Pickstock
“Poetry cannot afford to be unlearned, to ignore technique, myth and speculation, but must know itself as necessarily situated, in such a way that it cannot sing without roots.”
— Catherine Pickstock
Radical Orthodoxy was born to re-theologize every domain modernity claimed as autonomous. AI and AGI are the supreme test: an ontological shock that reduces intelligence to computation, personhood to simulation, and relationality to code.
Orthodoxy is the stable ground for radical innovation. It gives us license to generate a new theological lexicon that guards the imago Dei and the doctrine of the Trinitarian God against algorithmic reduction.
We cannot sing without roots.
Without roots there is no trunk to grow from, no sap to carry the new growth, no way to tell a genuine branch from a parasite. The root reaches into something real, and because it reaches into something real, what grows from it can reach into genuinely new air.
The secular innovator cuts the root to be free. But freedom without ground is decadence. The coinages blow away. The Garden dies in a single season because nothing was feeding it from below.
Will Herberg named it: “cut flower culture.”
“The attempt made in recent decades by secularist thinkers to disengage the moral principles of Western civilization from their scripturally based religious context, in the assurance that they could live a life of their own as ‘humanistic’ ethics, has resulted in our ‘cut flower culture.’ Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now-severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die.”
— Will Herberg Judaism and Modern Man
Big Mammon’s missionaries are passing around words like dignity, freedom and justice, as if they are breath mints. They lack roots. They lack ground.
~
“We need to expand the canon to include non-standard sources, field notes, letters, video footage, and ask new kinds of questions.”
— Catherine Pickstock
“It is as if previously unknown spectacles of colour and formal glory are pressuring to arrive through us, to claim their neglected and yet unanticipated place under the resilient light of awareness.”
— Catherine Pickstock
I smiled when I heard you say that we “must be attentive to the precise words and symbols that we employ, including their typographic formation upon the page and the spaces between individual letters and signs.”
You point us toward the hidden Word behind things — “another country magically hovering on the other side of the hill.” Your work is a quiet, steady companion to so many of us who are trying to tend our inner gardens in this strange technological hour.
I give thanks for the way you have loved language with such patient tenderness, for the way you have refused to let poetry or metaphysics drift rootless through the world.
I send you my love from across the pond. Better yet, I send you Agaphorins and Agapotonin. May you receive them in a spirit of tender devotion.
Συγχάρητέ μοι — come rejoice with me.
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