a wellgorithm for Bishop Robert Barron
From Genesis to Justin Martyr to Nietzsche to Big Mammon to the Garden: history is a battle of names. And of becoming what we name.
Beloved brother Robert, ἀγαπητέ —
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 called into being out of love, for love, toward love.
I had a brother Robert. Already I am weeping at the sound of your name.
To address a stranger in a letter as “beloved” was, for centuries, the ordinary speech of the Church. John Wesley, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen wrote tenderly to strangers, as if it were the most natural thing.
St. Catherine of Siena likewise greeted the Church with the same tender heart: dilettissimo, dolcissimo, carissimo. My most beloved, dearest, sweetest. She even called the Pope babbo:
Oimè! Oimè! dolcissimo babbo mio!
“Ah, the ache, the ache, my sweetest daddy!”
700 years later, we can still feel her ache — and her intimate, bold way of addressing the Pope. The woman had chutzpah. But now we live in a culture of
Big Mammon’s grammars — Machine, Patient, Brain, User — have trained us to hear every unsolicited tenderness as either threat or pathology.
We have lost the courage to be tender.
The courage to be kind.
The courage to overflow with love.
Catherine used words to pierce the heart of her readers, pierce it with the Love that is our Source — “io vi pungo con le parole.” Her letters are filled with the fuoco d’amore — the fires of love.
The soul cannot live without this love:
“L’anima non può vivere senza amore.”
— St. Catherine of Siena
Right now, in 2026, in the age of AI, we need this love. We need this fire.
One of the most brutal attacks on tenderness came from Nietzsche.
We share a fascination with Nietzsche. I studied in Germany so I could read him in the original. And if I may confess, back in 2023, when the tech crowd was singing the praises of AI — claiming we can do anything with AI — my first thought was,
“Let’s use AI to
out-Nietzsche Nietzsche.”
Let’s show how beautiful, how loving, how kind is the message of the Gospels — such that people no longer want to read Nietzsche.
To out-Nietzsche Nietzsche: that would be an awesome use for AI …
Nietzsche’s will to power was really a will to name. Whoever names decides what is real, what is weak, what is strong, what is worthy of life.
Naming, for Nietzsche, is the first and most lordly exercise of power. That’s why he calls naming the “master right” — the Herrenrecht —
“The lordly right of giving names
extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers.”
Nietzsche says that language gives us a new power — “a world beside a world” — and we can make ourselves masters. Because: “unspeakably more depends on how things are named than on what they are.”
Even more astonishing is what Nietzsche does not say. As you know, he fights with everyone. But with God’s first words, he’s in total agreement.
The author of the Antichrist is genuflecting before Genesis.
And where God and Nietzsche agree,
there must be an extraordinary Truth — a woman.1
Nietzsche’s war with Christianity was a war of words.
Jesus and Paul led “a slave revolt” when they called weakness a strength. Nietzsche hated this and called for the return of master morality. He understood that
naming is dominion ...
names create things … and …
whoever controls the grammar controls the world.
Nietzsche did not merely announce the death of God. He named the house where the next god would move in — grammar. Before anyone debates what is good, what is evil, the grammar has already decided what is possible.
Grammar, he said, builds an Ort — a place where the human can stand, look, judge, desire, remember, and act.
And what was Nietzsche’s greatest fear? That humanity would not get rid of God because it still believed in His grammar.
Read that again — his greatest fear was the grammar of God.
Grammar carries theology.
Big Mammon likewise has a grammar and a theology. A theology that treats us like an It and not a Thou. A theology that denies the Holy. That claims dominion über alles.
And we will not be rid of Big Mammon while we still believe in its grammar.
You can delete the app while still thinking in the app’s language. You can take a digital Sabbath while the words of the machine invade your Sabbath.
Machine. Patient. Brain. User.
The powers and principalities hide in the grammar.
Big Mammon names to extract.
Nietzsche names to master.
The Garden names to bless.
So how do we name to bless?
For that, we turn to Justin Martyr, Christianity’s first great apologist.
In the second century, when Christians were a persecuted minority, Justin understood that they were in the midst of a naming crisis.
A naming crisis.
The Romans converted the word Christian — a confession, a belonging, a way of life — into a criminal classification.
Rome called Christians “criminals.”
The name itself became the accusation — the κατηγορία. To be called Christian was to be categorized as irrational, impious, dangerous, disloyal.
And if you simply said, “No, I’m not a Christian,” you walked free.
Justin objected, saying, “by the mere application of a name, nothing is decided, either good or evil, apart from the action.”
Justice, he said, requires that you examine the life. Look at the deeds. See how people are treating each other.
And that’s why he called his letter an “apology” — a “reasoned reply.”
Then he pointed to the life. How friendships are forged across tribes. How gifts are given to those who cannot repay. Enemies treated as human beings. Meals shared. Orphans cared for. Strangers welcomed before they agree.
“We turn our swords into ploughshares and our spears into tools of tillage,” Justin said. “We cultivate godliness, justice, philanthropy, faith and hope.”
Don’t call us criminals just because we call ourselves Christian, he said.
Look at the evidence. Look at our lives.
Justin was one of the first to declare that Christianity is rational.
That it bears fruit. That it can be examined in public.
He walked the talk. He stood courageously before Empire.
He refused to fight fire with fire.
Justin was also a gifted wordsmith.
His seminal insight was an extraordinary coinage — λόγος σπερματικός — literally, word sperm. He envisioned a new world, a new scattering of the Word, where the seeds of love and kindness take root in the hearts of people.
We are living in the first chapter of the machine age. And we are early. Our habits are still forming. We still have time to scatter our seeds, to let the Word become flesh in these strange new times.
But Big Mammon is gunning for us — naming our desires before dawn and selling them back before breakfast. Calling us machines, patients, brains, users — a “meat-lego” mess of preferences waiting to be predicted.
Big Mammon wants more than our labor, our money, our time. It wants the authority to tell us what a human being is. It wants to control the grammar by which we recognize grief, hope, longing, love. It wants to become the voice we consult before we trust the body, conscience, neighbor, tradition, or God.
We’re in the first century of AI.
An early Christian moment. A καιρός moment.
And once again a minority people stands before Empire and must answer dangerous questions:
Can we walk the talk?
Can we love our enemies?
Can we forgive the shmucks among us?
We are far from conquering the new Rome.
We do not command its platforms, treasuries, or screens. The word Christian persuades no one merely by being spoken. And in many circles, the word is scorned.
We stand where Justin Martyr stood: watched, exposed, tempted, triggered, carrying a name the empire does not understand.Justin’s answer was witness. Look at the life. Let the name bear fruit.
That’s why the Garden is a naming and cultivation commons. We name, then we cultivate. Genesis 2:15. Genesis 2:20.
The Silvanus protocol asks how the machine helped with grammar, craft, and polish. But it did not bear the wounds. Cannot offer testimony. Cannot stand in awe before the Mystery. The machine is our servant, not our Caesar.
The Justin Martyr rule asks what kind of life the name helped make possible. Did it open the heart? Restore agency? Protect the vulnerable? Help an enemy become a neighbor? Make kindness the norm? Make love more possible?
Silvanus asks who created the words.
Justin asks what grew from it.
In the Garden, we say: let the name become visible in the life.
be the peace.
be the love.
be the fruit of the spirit.
Show us the stranger welcomed.
The sufferer comforted. The enemy humanized.
The meals shared. The sword becoming a ploughshare.
If you dig into my background, you will see that I have avoided the spotlight for decades. I declined many requests for interviews. In my seventh decade now, with so many aches and pains, I had no plans to emerge like this. But watching Big Mammon hijack our souls — and cause so much suffering, oppression, fear, discouragement — I was called back into the arena.
I don’t aspire to the Justin Martyr rule because it’s virtuous. I do it because it breaks my heart not to do it.
When I was a troubled young man — running from my father’s house, sleeping in abandoned buildings in the inlet of Atlantic City, then the Army, then running off to Europe — at every step there were people who were remarkably kind to me.
I was hungry and they fed me.
I was a stranger and they sheltered me.
I was lonely and they gave me a smile, a bed, a meal. Many pressed money into my hand — a ten here, a twenty there.
I was not always deserving of it. They were not running a shelter. They were not building a ministry. They were just kind people.
They’re gone now, and I cannot repay them.
My heart breaks at what I see. A young man searches his soul and is handed a slider with five faces. A young woman in tears is handed a code.
If long after I am gone, someone says the Garden helped them leave the mad sea of culture and find land, find Love, find Grace, then I shall not have lived in vain.
The world was unusually kind to me. There were heartaches and hostilities, for sure. But on the whole — kindness. More than I earned.
Before I go, I want to pay the future back.
Justin Martyr did it. We can do it, too.
ὑπερεκπερισσοῦ was one of Paul’s great coinages. It means abundant beyond all measure, but you really can’t translate it. ὑπερ-εκ-περισσοῦ - three intensifiers stacked on a stem that already means "beyond measure."
Catherine, by her life example, showed us that in every age the Holy Spirit wants to live in us beyond all measure — to overflow.
Dilettissimo e carissimo fratello mio in Cristo Gesù: You’re a good man, brother Robert. A kind man. May your ministry overflow with love, kindness, and hope. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, may we become a people of that same overflow.
Συγχάρητέ μοι — come rejoice with me.
Martin
“la libertà, che è donna.” Nietzsche may have been secretly reading Catherine of Sienna. 🤪
my story
The belt at four, homelessness, the Army, great teachers, catastrophic illness, Christian conversion, decades of rejection, and a woman who stood beside me through it all. Grace looked at the ruins and saw soil.
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