Today's Page · Friday, August 21, 2026
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redeemed

The Joy of Being Wrong: What Father Mike Schmitz's Conversion Reveals About Humility, Truth, and Hope

Father Mike Schmitz, whose Bible in a Year podcast has reached one billion downloads, recently described a formation crisis in which he concluded the Church was wrong and he was right. His account of that reversal — and the unexpected joy it produced — maps a moral architecture that Catholic mental health and faith formation practitioners recognize as genuinely therapeutic. Presence + examines what that structure actually is.

Aug 20, 2026 · 4 min read

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A 30-year Study Correlates Lack of Religious Community and Anxiety
emotional

A 30-year Study Correlates Lack of Religious Community and Anxiety

A study published in Developmental Science by Leonard Konstantin Kulisch, Ana Lorena Domínguez Rojas, Silvia Schneider, and Babett Voigt tracked anxiety disorder rates across 70 countries over three decades and found that where religious faith declined as a childrearing value, youth anxiety rose. The protective effect operates at the level of the community, not the individual household. For Catholic Christian families, the data confirms what a sound anthropology of the person already predicted.

Defend the Person, Propose the Gospel: What Archbishop Wester's Mosque Defense Reveals About Catholic Identity
justice worship

Defend the Person, Propose the Gospel: What Archbishop Wester's Mosque Defense Reveals About Catholic Identity

Archbishop John Charles Wester of Santa Fe publicly defended the right of Muslims to build a mosque in New Mexico, grounding his argument in Dignitatis Humanae and U.S. constitutional protections. His statement is correct as far as it goes — and Catholic tradition requires going further. Defending a neighbor's legal right to worship and praying with genuine charity for their conversion are not competing obligations; they are the same missionary posture held at full tension.

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Environments control people: what Skinner got right, and what he missed

B.F. Skinner argued that environments, not inner lives, shape human behavior. His insight captures something real about how habits form and disorders persist. But it leaves the person without a soul to save.

personal unity

The Hands That Think: What "Grandma Hobbies" Reveal About Body and Soul

Younger adults are picking up knitting, quilting, and sourdough baking in numbers large enough to draw wide press coverage. Catholic anthropology explains why this is more than a wellness trend: the human person is a body-soul unity, and work done with the hands trains faculties, attention, and vocation that screen-based labor systematically starves.

prudence caution

When Helping Becomes Controlling: How to Spot Coercive Dynamics in Coaching, Therapy, and Corporate Training

A new guide by therapist Jenni Walford names seven manipulation techniques, first identified in high-control religious groups, now normalized inside mainstream coaching, wellness, and leadership training. Her argument isn't that these programs are cults. It's that good intentions don't cancel harmful effects, and the reason the harm is real is freedom, not technique: Wojtyla's personalistic norm forbids treating a person merely as a means, however good the end.

interpersonal relational

Surrender, Rightly Understood: What "The Surrendered Wife" Gets Right About Freedom in Marriage

Laura Doyle's 1999 bestseller diagnosed a real dynamic: habitual control corrodes marriage. Wojtyła's personalist norm holds that spousal self-gift must never collapse into treating a partner as property to be managed. Read alongside Gottman's research on contempt and Aquinas on justice, Doyle's "surrender" turns out to name something genuinely theological.

prudence circumspection

The Reverse Centaur in the Exam Room: What a ChatGPT Lawsuit Reveals About Intellectual Proxy in Medicine and Psychology

A Florida pastor's lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT delayed care for a life-threatening condition, is the launch pad for a broader question: when does an AI tool augment human judgment, and when does it become an intellectual proxy that manages the person instead? Cory Doctorow's "reverse centaur" and Thomistic anthropology together sharpen what AI in medicine and psychology should, and should not, be allowed to become.