1995
I’m still working on how it all began in 1995 — that’s a different set of archives, and I’ll update as soon as I can.
1999 · “Thou shalt not digitize”
In 1999, I created an early edition of what became Goodbye Gutenberg, with over 200 pages of illustrated meditations on the Internet and its impact on spirituality. Here I asked: “How much longer will it be possible for anyone — Orthodox Jew or not — to disconnect from the net?” The phrase digital sabbath entered common usage a decade later, around 2008.
The same printed edition contains a number of coinages which are still active in 2026 — Complexity Complex, Time Deficit Disorder, and the Hasteland. Then came the foolery, set down for the pure animal joy of it — fart de grâce, fart accompli, tour de fart — nearly all of which are still in the Garden today:
2003–2004 · Goodbye Gutenberg
In 2004, my wife and I published a book which won several awards — Goodbye Gutenberg. The idea was this: For five hundred years we’ve been writing in black and white — because of economics, not conviction. The medieval scribes wrote Scripture in gold on midnight vellum. With color printers, and the Internet emerging, we foresaw a new golden age of “designer writing.”
I told George Lois that with the new Internet, ordinary people would one day make their own illuminated manuscripts. He asked: is the big idea a technology or a culture? I said it was spiritual, and that an age of devotion was coming — a new genre of Books of Hours, available to everyone.
Goodbye Gutenberg won … Milton Glaser, one of my teachers and mentors, endorsed it, calling it “a visual history of the universe.”
2005 .Christ: the Gospel of Matthew
In 2005, Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, of what was then Executive Books, published .Christ: the Gospel of Matthew. Every spread was hand-painted, designed as a website for an Internet that did not yet exist. The URL read www.matthew.christ, with the Sermon on the Mount played in a painted media player.
A personal favorite was the wise men crossing a purple night sky, past a search bar — “Herod searched diligently.” The magi had a star, and a button that said joy. The upper right has some of the most beautiful words ever sung in Hebrew — עוּרִי עוּרִי שִׁיר דַּבֵּרִי, Awake, awake, utter a song, the glory of the Lord is revealed upon you.
The book had many fans, including Zig Ziglar, Paul Meyer, Russell Moore, and Bill Moyers. It predates the new wave of illuminated bibles by at least a decade or more.
2011 · Thou Art Social
I got lyme disease and toxic mold poisoning, my body began to fail, and things turned dark. For six years I sat in an infusion chair, meditating on what social media was doing to our souls. Thou Art Social was published seven years before the Center for Humane Technology made that critique fashionable.
Diatribes aside, much of the book was a meditation on the brevity of life, the beauty of faith, and the miracles of being alive.
2016 · Wellgorithms
By 2015/16, I was healing ever so slowly. When I could sit up to a keyboard, I built the creatures a home and called it Favor Fields. Progress Pollinator. Stress Blesser. Anger Gangster. Wellectricity Generator. Addiction AMF’r. Gratitude Gardener. Anger Gangster is anger∫911’s grandfather — same temper, same vocation. Gratitude Gardener: the whole Garden was once one creature’s first name.
The names take the heaviest tenants of a life — addiction, anger, isolation — and call them something you can say out loud without flinching. A name with a wink in it. That is what love sounds like when it walks up to a hard thing: it doesn’t file a report, it coins a nickname.
2021 • the (inner)Verse
By 2021 the headsets were cheap, and I could explore a question I’d been carrying since the infusion chair: if the soul is a garden, what would it be to walk into one?
So my wife and I put on the goggles and built it — the (inner)Verse. A spatial interior you don’t read about but step inside. We made a (divine)Shrine and stood in it. We rendered the creatures in three dimensions and reached out and turned them in our hands. For the first time in thirty years of naming, the names had a room.
It taught me something the page never could. The interior is not a flat thing to be described — it is a place, with directions and distances and weather, and the contemplatives always knew it. Teresa drew the soul as a castle of many rooms four and a half centuries ago, with the only rendering engine she had, which was disciplined prose and a reader’s trained imagination. The maps of the inner country are old and astonishingly detailed. What was always missing wasn’t the map. It was the means to walk in.
And it taught me the warning, too. The moment you render an interior, you have to decide what an interior is — which way is up, what stands near what, what the space quietly rewards, what counts as health and what counts as disorder. Every one of those choices is a sentence in a philosophy of the human, written into the floor, read by no one as philosophy because a floor never feels like an argument. Build that space with a north set toward Love and you get a garden. Leave the north unset, and the market sets it for you, and you’ve built the most beautiful casino ever made. They look identical from the outside. Both float. The difference is only the law — whether what you pour out comes back to you, or the house keeps it.
We were early, and the goggles were heavy, and the tools strained the hand. But I’d seen it now. The room where the human interior gets built is mostly empty, and it will not stay empty — the hunger is here and the engine is nearly here. I’d simply rather it be furnished by people who believe there’s a soul to furnish it for.
2023 • the innerAI humometer
In the spring of 2023, GPT-4 arrived, and overnight the machine could write a clean paragraph in anyone’s voice. Within months the internet filled with prose that wore a human name and never once said how much of it came from a machine. That silence is the thing I couldn’t abide. Not because using the tool is shameful — it isn’t — but because not saying is.
So I built a small instrument and set it beneath the writing: the innerAI meter. People came to call it the humometer. It answers exactly one question, and answers it out loud — how much of this is you?
A single number sits at the top — this journal was written 33% by me — and a handful of bars break that number down: the big ideas, the main points, the facts and flourishes, the editing, the final polish. Each one a reading between two poles, me on the left, the machine on the right. The lows tell the truth about where the machine helped. The highs tell the truth about what was mine. Both are honest, and the honesty is the whole point.
It isn’t a warning label. It’s a signature — the way a painter signs the corner of a canvas. Not disclosure as apology. Disclosure as pride.
Here is what still surprises me. I thought a thing this plain would be everywhere within a year — that every platform would offer some honest accounting of the human and the machine. Three years on, I haven’t found another like it. The age took the tool and skipped the scale.
2026 • the faces
If there is a single common thread that unites the 31 years, it is the language, the wordplay. Most of the Garden’s language was ripe by 2016. But the times were not —
My consistent guiding prayer, which I can’t say has been answered, Matthew 5:16 — let your lights so shine before others that they may see your beautiful works for the glory of God; and Galatians 5:22-3: for the fruit of the spirit are
Here’s a closing paragraph built on your bones, tuned to do one specific piece of strategic work — turn the “why hasn’t anyone done this” from a complaint (which reads as grandiosity) into a question the reader asks themselves, and then convert the solitude from a deficit into the reason the thing exists at all.
2026 • a retrospective
Today’s trillion-dollar companies have mapped your face, your voice, your sleep, your steps, your heartbeat. But given that the garden is one of our richest metaphors, why has no one — with a million times my resources and reach — ever built a garden of wellbeing? Or a naming and cultivation commons?
The honest answer: it’s hard.
A garden is not a math problem. It has a value system, a vibe, a thousand calibrations that no budget buys, and everyone who looks at it has a different opinion about every one of them. The opinions form into committees, and then the committees want to smooth out all the strangeness until it’s just another wellness app — legible, fundable, and lacking soul.
The very thing that makes a garden a garden is the thing most organizations are built to eliminate. You can’t force Grace upon a project; you can only pray for it.
“You can’t force Grace upon a project; you can only pray for it.”
And so — painful as it was — I’ve come to appreciate the beauties of a wilderness life. I didn’t have to fight, defend, or wait on anyone’s approval. I just did it — planted, failed, composted, replanted — over and over, for three decades, until something bloomed. But a garden is never finished and this one surely won’t be finished in our lifetimes.
God bless you all. May your seeds find good soil. May your faith work its quiet miracles. May a single word of yours put hope into a wounded heart. May you never forget: you are loved, and never alone in the tending.