About Solomon Gray
A layperson who drifted away, came home, and is still figuring it out.
The easiest way to explain what this book is, and why it exists, is to tell you about three people. These are composites — details changed, identifying features blurred — but every one of them is drawn from people who are real.
A few years ago, a friend lost his father. The funeral was small. Afterward, he went home and opened the only Bible he still owned — a confirmation gift, thirty years old, mostly unread. He did not know where to start. He opened it somewhere in the middle. What he found was Sirach. He told me later that he read for two hours and did not move. He said: ‘I had no idea any of this was in there. I thought I knew what the Bible said.’ He is, today, a regular reader of the Wisdom Books. He is not a theologian. He is a guy who discovered that the Bible had been keeping a room for him the whole time.
The man who came back to Sirach.
She taught eighth grade religious education for nine years. She stopped going to Mass three years ago for reasons she does not fully understand and does not feel the need to defend. She still prays. She still believes in God. She just does not believe, right now, in the place she was raised. When I told her I was writing about the Wisdom Books, she said: 'Those are the boring ones, aren't they?' I asked her when she last read Job. She said: 'I have never read Job.' She is forty-six years old. She taught religion for nine years. She has never read Job. This book is for her.
The woman who used to teach CCD.
The college student who found Ecclesiastes.
He was a sophomore at a state school. He had drifted away from the faith he was raised in. He was not angry; he was tired of explanations that did not survive his first philosophy class. He texted me one night at 11:42 p.m. to ask if I had ever read Ecclesiastes. He had been assigned it for a literature survey. He said: 'It reads like someone saw through everything and kept going anyway. I did not know the Bible had anything like this in it.' He is reading scripture regularly, for the first time in his adult life. I do not know where he will end up. But he has been reading Sirach on Sunday mornings, which is not nothing.
Themes about how to actually live a life, not just how to think about one.
A note on the name.
I drifted away from the Catholic Church for a long time, and what brought me back was not an argument or a guilt trip. It was the Bible — specifically, seven books of it that most of us skip. The Wisdom Books. I wrote The Original Search Engine because I think those books contain something the world needs right now. My biography is not the point. What they say is.
The pen name is honest about this. It is a voice decision, not a marketing decision. The work has to stand on its own.
Because the Wisdom Books do not need credentials to be true. If I told you my name, my job, my city, you would spend the next ten minutes deciding whether I am credible instead of deciding whether the books I am pointing at are worth reading. I would rather you spend that time on them.
In one paragraph.
The Original Search Engine is a forty-chapter journey through the seven Wisdom Books of the Bible — Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach — read as if they were written for the life you have now, because they were. Two hundred and forty verses. Forty chapters. Seven books most Catholics have never finished. An invitation, not an argument.
The discipline behind the book.
40
Chapters
240
Scripture verses
7
Wisdom Books
Every chapter was reviewed across 17 structured reviewer sessions before the manuscript was considered ready for external readers.
Read Chapter 14 for free.
It is called ‘The Watched.’ It is the chapter that people who finish the book talk about most. It is the one I would hand you if we were sitting across a table.
For Press & Media
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