The Method

Everything on this site is made one way, and this page says what the way is. A man decides what is true here, what a page is for, what is asked of a passage, what stays, what is cut, and what is never shown at all. A machine drafts the sentences to his order and builds the pages that carry them. Nothing is published unread, and most of what is drafted is not published.

The claim being tested is small and old. It is not that a machine can tell. Telling belongs to tellers, and the scriptures have theirs. It is that a machine can illustrate, the way an engraver once worked under an author, and that the work should be met as true, good and beautiful first, and only then asked where it came from. A page that is false is not saved by how it was made. A page that is true is not undone by it.

It matters to say what the machine is not. It is not an author and not a collaborator. It does not believe what these pages say, does not understand what it drafts, does not reach for the horizon they reach for. It drafts. The reaching, and the answering for what is published, belong to the man.

What the pages reach for has a name in the oldest books, and the site mostly lets the name go unsaid. The scriptures call her Wisdom: the breath of the power of God, the brightness of the everlasting light, the one who was there when the world was made and who goes about looking for anyone who will have her. She is God’s own life turned toward us, never a fourth beside the Three, and the world is her other side, lit from inside. The tree on the cover is hers. Its fruit is the bread on the table. That is the whole of what this site is about, and it is said here once so that it need not be said again.

The horizon in the name is the transcendent horizon: the thing every telling reaches for and none of them owns. No method arrives at it, this one included. What a method can do is keep the work honest on the way, and leave you free to do the one thing no machine can do for you, which is to judge what is in front of you.