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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

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mm Ted

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jun 25, 2023

“Do not be afraid.” Mt. 10:32 “Do not be afraid,” Jesus tells us. And yet, we are. We’re very afraid. At least this is what a New York Times e-article...

mm Tom Carney

What Makes Life Valuable?

Jun 22, 2023

I had an acquaintance who suffered from a particularly virulent form of cancer. He was only in his 50s, but the pain and indignity caused by his illness was...

mm Ted

The Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jun 16, 2023

“The harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few…. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, drive out demons” Mt. (9:37 and 10:8) Blase Cupich, a Cardinal who...

mm Ted

The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ

Jun 16, 2023

 “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever.” Jn. 6:51 In 1594, Italian renaissance artist Jacopo Tintoretto, completed a masterpiece...

mm Ted

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Jun 16, 2023

“… The love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us.” Romans, 5:5 There’s a story that’s told about...

mm Tom Carney

The Problem with Religious Language

Jun 15, 2023

After I had been a writer at the Des Moines Register for several years, the editor came to my desk one day to ask me to become the medical/health-care...

mm Tom Carney

Wanting “the Best”

Jun 08, 2023

Rachel Connolly recently wrote a column in the New York Times called “The Tyranny of the Best.” “There is a kind of person who finds the idea of seeking...

mm Tom Carney

Why Bad Things Happen

Jun 01, 2023

My brother-in-law, Jose Mario Botero, recently took a terrible fall down a spiraling, steel staircase in his home in Medellín, Colombia. It resulted in a massive head injury, and...