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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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Past Posts

mm Tom Carney

Why Religious Leaders Warn about AI

Oct 02, 2026

Is there a subject about which the media has been more obsessed than Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Daily, news and commentary about AI is in the newspapers, on TV news...

mm Tom Carney

Remembering Him

Sep 25, 2026

First, a comment for my beloved non-Catholic readers. This is a blog about the Catholic Mass. You’re welcome to read it, of course, but it will undoubtedly be more...

mm Tom Carney

Love and Other Squishy Words

Sep 18, 2026

It’s common among many families today to express their love for one another verbally. They say “Love you” at the end of a telephone conversation and say similar things...

mm Tom Carney

Getting Over Ourselves

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At my advanced age, I’m well aware of the stereotypes about the elderly. My new friend, ChatGPT, of whom I’m still suspicious (One of the marks of an elderly...

mm Tom Carney

Black Skirts and Funny Hats

Sep 04, 2026

I grew up Catholic in the “old church,” that is, before the Vatican Council of the early 1960s when the world’s bishops met in Rome to “turn the church...

mm Tom Carney

Can You Think Your Way to Faith?

Aug 29, 2026

Charles Murray was a small-town Iowa boy. Son of an executive in the Maytag Corporation, he eventually went to Harvard University where he received a bachelor’s degree in history...

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Will the Meek Really Inherit the Earth?

Aug 21, 2026

It sure doesn’t seem so. This “Beatitude” in Mathew’s gospel is arguably one of the hardest to accept because the evidence for the opposite is so compelling. The arrogant,...

mm Tom Carney

Jesus and Me?

Aug 14, 2026

Just before the turn of the 20th century, a child was born to a Brooklyn, NY, family that was “solid, patriotic, and middle class,” says Wikipedia. The child’s father was a sportswriter...