SUNDAY, 9 p.m., midnight

Help! I’m a Hoarder

THE LEARNING CHANNEL This hour-long special profiles three of the perhaps more than one million Americans who suffer from compulsive cluttering: the inability to discard things.

MONDAY, 9 p.m.

History Detectives

PBS Tonight’s segments involve an artillery shell that possibly escaped German spies’ sabotage explosion of two million pounds of munitions at Black Tom Island in New York Harbor on July 30, 1916; a Nebraska farmhouse’s etched-glass window that might portray the cruiser U.S.S. Olympia, flagship of Commodore George Dewey in the Spanish-American War; and a house in Schenectady, N.Y., that might have had a role in the French and Indian War (1754-1763).

WEDNESDAY, 9 p.m.

The Big Swell

SCIENCE CHANNEL This 2004 documentary follows a giant ocean swell spawned by a North Pacific winter storm that ends up as a series of huge breakers for big-wave surfers to challenge in Northern California. Re-airs 4 p.m. Saturday.

THURSDAY, 8 p.m., live

Life on the Rock

EWTN Every fall, Catholic students new to college encounter major challenges to their faith. Tonight’s guest, pro-life bioethicist and philosopher Christopher Kaczor of The Catholic University of America, provides essential spiritual survival tips for students from his recent booklet, How to Stay Catholic in College.

THURSDAY, 10 p.m.

Out of Left Field: The Making of the Chinese Olympic Baseball Team

PBS The murderous Communist despot Mao Zedong (1893-1976) banned baseball in China, but for the past four years, with Major League Baseball’s okay, ex-U.S. stars Jim Lefebvre and Bruce Hurst have been readying a Chinese team for this year’s Olympics. The Chinese players’ and U.S. coaches’ mutual language is baseball, says Hurst.

FRIDAY, 8 a.m.

Daily Mass: The Assumption of the B.V.M.

EWTN “See the beauty of the daughter of Jerusalem, who ascended to heaven like the rising sun at dawn,” says the Daily Office. The Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word celebrate Mass on the Feast of the Assumption. Re-airs noon, 7 p.m., midnight.

FRIDAY, 10:30 a.m.

This Is the Day

CATHOLIC TV Guests are Ansel Augustine, a Catholic Youth Organization coordinator in New Orleans and campus minister at Xavier University, and Ray Herrmann, who performs a hymn from a Rosary CD with music composed by St. Alphonsus Liguori. Re-airs 6 p.m.

FRIDAY, 8 p.m., midnight

America’s Loch Ness Monster

DISCOVERY Are there creatures of God we have not yet encountered? Experts are going hi-tech to search for “Champ,” a supposed aquatic denizen of Lake Champlain, which borders New York and Vermont.

Dan Engler writes from
Santa Barbara, California.