DAILY CALL SHEET: JULY 8, 2025

A Dark Song (2016) Unable to get over the death of her seven-year old son, Sophia comes up with a desperate plan. She persuades Joseph, a dubious practitioner of magic, to move into a rental home with her and engage in a grueling months-long ritual designed to manifest her guardian angel, who in turn will allow her to communicate with the spirit of her son. The catch is that the rite eventually requires a ceremony of forgiveness which Sophia will have nothing to do with. As a result, things go horribly, horribly wrong. This dark and brutal tale of grief definitely falls into the category of "not for most people", but if it clicks with you, it will click hard.

TIL: The ritual in A Dark Song is actually derived from a real life Kabbalistic novel called The Book of Abramelin written sometime around the year 1400. Kabbalah at its most benevolent is an esoteric way of thought formulated primarily by 12th and 13th century Jewish mystics which focuses on pondering God's creation of the world, and at its worst is a gateway to Occultism.  From a Christian standpoint, the more benevolent path of Kabbalah leads to errors about the nature of God (e.g. Lurianic Kabbalah suggests evil originates from God), errors which can endanger the soul. The worst path, the one that has stuff like trying to usurp God's will through conjurations and such, leads straight to Hell.

The Cat from Outer Space (1978) When his downed spacecraft is seized by the military, a feline-like alien named Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7 (or Jake to his friends) enlists the aid of an Earth scientist to help get it back. Lots of family friendly hijinks ensue as Jake and his pals outwit the government and a cadre of corporate criminals who want Jake's powers for their own purposes. Likely released to cash-in on the booming UFO craze in the wake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this perfectly pleasant live-action Disney fare is probably a tad bit too long, but nostalgia and the simple fact that it stars a cool cat keeps me from ragging on it too much.

TIL: The Church has no official position on aliens other than their existence would have zero effect on her teachings. However, if there were an extraterrestrial rational species (ETRS) with rational souls and free will (basically made in the image of God like us), Notre Dame's Christopher Baglow has some thoughts. He speculates that under the principle of particularity (the divine tendency to deal with a particular people first rather the entirety of humanity), it's hypothetically possible an ETRS might experience an Incarnation of God particular to their own unique physicality. In short, if Jake was real, his planet might have experienced a cat version of Jesus. Yeah, probably not, but it's a fun thought exercise.