Welcome!

“Do Not Be Afraid … You Are My Dearest Friends”*

Toxic Fear is perhaps life’s greatest hostage-taker. One psychiatrist calls it a “disease of the imagination.” Fear and disabling Worry can start off like a tiny seed and, watered by thoughts that emphasize worst-case scenarios, grow into a virus-like fiend that ends up dominating our mental state. It then holds us back from our ability to enjoy nearly every dimension of our life: our talents, our work, our love, our play, and our approach to a life in the Spirit.

This website is dedicated to three major Defense Systems that can be effective in helping us overcome the insidious nature of fear, as well as other mental health demons like depression. It will also focus on how we can better live out our lives free of those persistent foragers that roam throughout the corners of our minds… relentlessly haunting us.

Those three Defense Systems are: Spirituality, Psychology and Addiction. All three of these provide newly developed means of delving into the root causes of fear and depression and other mental health disorders, and assisting people in finding improved pathways to freedom, joy, and peace.

“Do not be afraid” – a phrase found 365 times in Sacred Scripture!

*Luke 12:32; translation found in The Bible in Contemporary Language, Eugene H. Peterson

Recent Posts

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  • A Question for God

    I’m participating in a program at our parish called “Alpha.” Its aim is to discuss basic questions about God – including God’s existence – about who Jesus is, or was, …

  • The Age of Confusion?

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  • RSVP

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  • Faith Like Falling in Love?

    I’ve often quoted New York Times columnist David Brooks in these blogs because I find his columns unusually insightful. And, unlike many columnists in that publication and others, he doesn’t …

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Past Posts

mm Ted

Three ways to improve the synod of bishops

Nov 13, 2015

An article by Thomas Reese, S.J. in The National Catholic Reporter: Three ways to improve the synod of bishops

mm Tom Carney

What Good Is Faith That Doesn’t Challenge Us?

Nov 12, 2015

The Catholic Church, to which I belong, has just finished a meeting of church leaders in Rome called the Synod on the Family. It started on Oct. 4 and...

mm Ted

Francis: Lay people not ‘second class’ members of Catholic church

Nov 12, 2015

Francis: Lay people not ‘second class’ members of Catholic church

mm Ted

Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Nov 12, 2015

“But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Mk. 13:32 May 21, 2011 Remember that date?...

mm Ted

Crux:US bishops advise dioceses how to deal with ‘Spotlight’ movie

Nov 12, 2015

Article by Lisa Wagness in Crux, publication of the Boston Globe. Crux:US bishops advise dioceses how to deal with ‘Spotlight’ movie

mm Ted

Catholicism can and must change, Francis forcefully tells Italian church gathering

Nov 10, 2015

A recent article in the National Catholic Reporter gives an update on the Pope’s thoughts after the Synod of Bishops. Catholicism can and must change, Francis forcefully tells Italian...

mm Ted

NYTimes: How Doctors Helped Drive the Addiction Crisis

Nov 09, 2015

An article in the New York Times by Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and director of psychopharmocolgy at the Well Cornell Medical College discusses the “addiction...

mm Ted

Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Nov 08, 2015

“… but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.” Mk. 12:44 “In God We Trust” We all recognize these words. Two thousand years after...