A woman who hates her unborn child. A scheming Klingon. A Prime Directive that’s barely an idea yet. Dom Bettinelli, Fr. Jason Tyler, and Jimmy Akin unpack D.C. Fontana’s bold “Friday’s Child.”
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The 1928 Earling Exorcisms were documented in a booklet called Begone Satan — but that wasn’t the full story.
In 1934, a secret manuscript was written by Fr. J. Bunza, based on Father Theophilus Reisinger’s own German account. It was never meant for public circulation. And what it reveals about the Earling case goes far beyond anything in the published account.
According to the manuscript, “Emma’s” (aka “Anna”) possessions didn’t end in 1928. They continued for years. During those years, Emma reportedly received visions of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and heavenly figures — and those visions escalated into sweeping apocalyptic claims.
The manuscript asserts that St. Michael the Archangel himself confirmed the Earling exorcisms were the cosmic battle described in Revelation 12: the war in heaven between Michael and the dragon. Billions upon billions of demons were cast into the abyss. The Pope’s very freedom was secured because of them.
But that was only the beginning. The manuscript goes further, claiming that Jesus himself gave Father Reisinger a specific mission — to warn the world about the Antichrist, who had already been born in Palestine, possessed by the spirit of Judas Iscariot from conception. The Antichrist would reign during three days of literal darkness. A figure known as the Great Monarch would lead Christendom during this final conflict. The manuscript even named a candidate: Otto von Habsburg, young heir to one of Europe’s most storied Catholic dynasties.
Every one of those prophecies failed. The Antichrist never reigned. Otto never became king. The Three Days of Darkness never came.
Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli work through the manuscript’s claims systematically — evaluating the hoax theory, examining mental illness frameworks, and scrutinizing each preternatural element (xenoglossy, detection of relics, Father Steiger’s car accident, the reported vomiting, possible levitation) in detail. Then they examine what the failure of every specific prophecy tells us about the manuscript’s authenticity.
Whatever happened in Earling, the secret manuscript’s predictions didn’t match reality. That failure may be the most revealing thing in the entire case.
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She erased the memory. The guilt came back anyway. T’Pol hunts a Vulcan fugitive on an icy moon — and relives a killing she’d had ritually purged from her mind. Dom Bettinelli and Jimmy Akin on memory, guilt, and trust.
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In 1928, an exorcism unfolded in a tiny Iowa convent. It inspired a 2016 movie. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli examine the public account and a never-published secret manuscript of the Earling Exorcism. Part 1 of 2.
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Rosary Army. Featuring award-winning Catholic podcasts, Rosary resources, videos, and the School of Mary online community, prayer, and learning platform. Learn how to make them, pray them, and give them away while growing in your faith at RosaryArmy.com and SchoolOfMary.com
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Photo used with permission of St. Joseph Parish, Earling, Iowa.
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Tom Paris and Neelix crash on Planet Hell and are forced to care for a newly-hatched alien creature — and finally put their rivalry over Kes to rest. Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler break down the Voyager episode Parturition. Stranded together, Paris and Neelix must cooperate to care for a newly-hatched creature. The panel examines Neelix’s controlling jealousy, Janeway’s command style, plot logic holes, and the writers’ deliberate choice to finally resolve the Paris-Neelix tension.
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In 1952, a self-taught philosopher near Palomar Mountain walked into the California desert and claimed to meet a being from Venus. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli investigate the remarkable story of George Adamski, the first UFO contactee.
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In DS9’s “Crossfire,” Odo’s longing for Kira collides with First Minister Shakaar’s confidence. Dom Bettinelli, Fr. Jason Tyler, and Jimmy Akin ask: is Odo’s emotional rigidity protecting him — or guaranteeing heartbreak?
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TNG’s “The Hunted” is a Vietnam allegory that rarely gets its due. Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler examine what works, what doesn’t, and how stronger dramatic choices could have made it truly great.
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In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen spent seven obsessive weeks locked in his lab, convinced he had gone mad. What he had actually discovered — invisible rays that passed through solid objects and revealed the bones beneath skin — earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics and gave the world X-rays.
That discovery kicked off one of the most remarkable six-year periods in the history of science. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli trace the full arc of radiation’s discovery, beginning with the eccentric English scientist William Crookes — who invented both the radiometer and the Crookes tube, discovered element thallium, and spent years investigating psychic phenomena under controlled conditions. His Crookes tube laid the groundwork for everything that followed.
Henri Becquerel stumbled onto natural radioactivity in 1896 when photographic plates he had left in a dark drawer came out exposed. The uranium salt sitting on top had been emitting invisible rays on its own — no sunlight, no electrical apparatus required. Marie Curie took that discovery and ran with it, showing through painstaking measurement that radioactivity is a property of atoms themselves, not of chemical reactions. That single insight cracked open modern atomic physics and proved the ancient Greek atomists wrong: atoms are not indivisible.
Marie and Pierre Curie went on to discover two new elements — polonium (named for Marie’s occupied homeland, Poland) and radium, which is a million times more radioactive than uranium — and Marie coined the term radioactivityitself. She became the first person, man or woman, to receive two Nobel Prizes: one in Physics in 1903 and one in Chemistry in 1911.
Ernest Rutherford extended the work further, identifying alpha and beta particles, proving one element can transmute into another (a discovery his colleague Soddy nearly called “transmutation” before Rutherford shut that down), and using radioactive helium bubbles trapped in ancient rock to calculate that the Earth is at least 500 million years old — overturning Lord Kelvin’s confident and thoroughly wrong 20-million-year estimate. Paul Villard rounded out the era by discovering gamma rays in 1900.
Jimmy and Dom also address what radiation actually is — ionizing vs. non-ionizing, particle vs. electromagnetic — and why the scary reputation is overstated. From the faith perspective, they examine radiation as something God wove into creation: enabling sight, hearing, evolution, and cellular repair.
https://youtu.be/W0xCfGFYut0
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This Episode is Brought to You By:
Rosary Army. Featuring award-winning Catholic podcasts, Rosary resources, videos, and the School of Mary online community, prayer, and learning platform. Learn how to make them, pray them, and give them away while growing in your faith at RosaryArmy.com and SchoolOfMary.com
The Grady Group, a Catholic company bringing financial clarity to their clients across the United States. Using safe money options to produce reasonable rates of return for their clients. Learn more by visiting GradyGroupInc.com.
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The season finale of Starfleet Academy Season 1, “RubinCon,” stages a live-broadcast Federation trial, sends cadets racing to neutralize omega mines, and asks whether a season’s worth of character work can pay off in a single hour. Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler break it down.
Nus Braka’s show trial is equal parts spectacle and procedural chaos. Anisha is appointed judge despite already knowing Caleb is alive and a plan is in motion — and still rules irrationally, leaving the panel wondering why the writers gave away the dramatic tension before it was needed. The larger problem is the backstory reveal: Braka’s entire vendetta turns out to be rooted in a childhood misperception. Strontium burns red. Federation weapons fire doesn’t. His father’s missiles killed his colony, not the Federation’s. The panel argues that while the twist is clever in isolation, it radically deflates a villain who had genuine menace — and fits a troubling modern pattern of antagonists whose menace is unhinged irrationality rather than cold calculation. Khan, the benchmark they’re all chasing, had both.
Captain Ake’s courtroom defense prompts a comparison worth having: how would Picard, Sisko, or Kirk have handled the same tribunal? The panel finds Ake emotionally credible but lacking the steel those captains brought — the restrained righteous indignation of Sisko, the Shakespearean reserve of Picard, Kirk’s barely-contained fury. Meanwhile, Reno’s command of the Athena is the episode’s clearest win. Her instinct to keep teaching even in crisis — quizzing cadets rather than simply ordering them — functions as both character consistency and a practical way to keep nervous young officers focused on what they’ve been trained to do.
The omega mine neutralization leans on Trek’s most reliable crutch: technology that conveniently fails until it just as conveniently doesn’t. The air-pressure-as-sensor-countermeasure gets particularly rough treatment, capped by listener feedback cataloguing the three 20th-century detection technologies — thermal imaging, audio, Doppler shift — that would have blown the plan in seconds. The panel also maintains a “hug counter” throughout, which reaches impressive heights by the time the group embrace closes the episode.
Stepping back, the season one verdict is nuanced: better than feared going in, but structurally hampered by the abbreviated episode count that defines streaming-era prestige TV. Short seasons rush character development and leave the cast emotionally remote. DS9’s Julian Bashir took time to become someone worth caring about; Starfleet Academy’s cadets never quite get there. Season 2 is confirmed as the last, and all three panelists are cautiously open to returning — especially if the rumored shift away from a central villain in favor of a situational threat bears out.
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