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“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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    Pardon me if I’ve told this story before. On one of my trips to rural El Salvador with fellow parishioners from Iowa, I was walking down a dirt road – …

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mm Ted

The Importance of Jesus

Jul 06, 2015

For the greater part of my life, I have been haunted by the person of Jesus. From my earliest days as a child, there was something compelling about him...

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Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jul 05, 2015

“ … when I am weak, then I am strong.” 2 Cor: 12:10 Many years ago I was working as a therapist at a famous alcohol and drug treatment...

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Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jul 05, 2015

“Little girl, I say to you, arise!” Mk. 5:41 “I forgive you.” These were the words spoken by Nadine Collier as tears ran down her face. She was speaking...

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Getting Home

Jul 02, 2015

I recently attended a Mass at Old St. Patrick’s Church in Chicago’s West Loop where the new archbishop, Blase Cupich, happened to be visiting and conducting the liturgy. As...

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Finding Your Calm

Jun 25, 2015

For many of us in the western world, a glut of obstacles impedes the search for God. In my view, they include indulgent prosperity, religious illiteracy, damaging sex, secularism and...

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Good Old-Fashioned Hate

Jun 18, 2015

Years ago, a colleague at The Des Moines Register related what happened when he was covering members of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS, who were protesting...

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Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jun 14, 2015

“… the kingdom of God … is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it...

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Who’s In and Who’s Not?

Jun 11, 2015

My admiration for Pope Francis is no secret to readers of this blog. So what’s his greatest contribution to the modern world? In my opinion, it’s his oft-quoted conviction...