Matt Walsh has written a very insightful article about the recent meteoric rise in the number of ADHD diagnoses in school-aged children. Children are being diagnosed — and consequently are being prescribed powerful psychiatric medications — at ever higher rates and at ever younger ages. On what basis are these diagnoses being made? Walsh has a hypothesis: Well, the National Institute of Mental Health offers a clue (emphasis mine): People who have ADHD have combinations…
I was not always a Christian. For many years of my life — may God forgive me — I viewed Christianity as something primitive and simplistic, something irrational and even immoral (like so many of the children of modernity, I considered the entire concept of the Last Judgment as theologically and morally indefensible — such was the enormity of my pride). And for many years, like the young St. Augustine, I wandered…
May God have mercy on us. Yet another school shooting yesterday, with 10 dead and as many wounded. And this time the murderer came from an Orthodox family. And even some the students who survived are not really surprised that it happened: A video interview with one student, Paige Curry, spread across social media, an artifact of a moment when children have come to expect violence in their schools. “Was there a…
Here’s a question for you: which of the following two statistics, each indicative of the apostasy engulfing our nation, is more disturbing? A) Over the last 14 years, 11% of Americans have abandoned Christianity — 35 million people in terms of the US population level in 2017. B) 72% of the American people as of 2017 identify as Christians, yet 73% believe that divorce is morally acceptable, 69% believe that extramarital sex is morally…
The nearly unquestioned assumption about school shootings is that they are usually perpetrated by the mentally ill. This psychiatrist disagrees: The reason the mental health system fails to prevent mass shootings is that mental illness is rarely the cause of such violence. Even if all potential mass shooters did get psychiatric care, there is no reliable cure for angry young men who harbor violent fantasies. And the laws intended to stop the…
Today’s feast has many meanings, many aspects, and even many names. It is sometimes called the Meeting of the Lord, sometimes the Purification of the Virgin, sometimes the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, and finally, especially in the West, it is known as Candlemas – the Feast of the Light that shown upon St. Symeon and which we remember by blessing candles on this day. This multiplicity of names and meanings…
