Star Trek isn’t political. It’s theological.
Call anybody you want. They can’t do anything to me, not anymore, and nor can any of you. I am a human being, damn it! […] You can pulp a story but you cannot destroy an idea. Don’t you understand?…
Darmok and Jalad in the Upper Room
A recurring theme in some of the strongest episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation is the pursuit of understanding. You could almost say that this theme is a core value of the Star Trek universe as a whole. For…
Terraforming the Human Soul
Through Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry envisioned a future Earth with no war, disease, or division, a place of peace and human unity. It is an ideal that closely reflects the culmination of the Christian gospel, only without the Christian gospel.…
From Farpoint to the Poker Table: Picard Walking in Fellowship
The very first time we meet Captain Jean-Luc Picard he is shrouded in darkness, peering out a window into the great unexplored mass of the galaxy. He is alone in the shadows, having just taken command of the Enterprise-D, and…
What You Control Can’t Hurt You: Fear, Victimhood, and the Dominion
Fear takes many shapes. From cowering victim to preemptive striker, from passive aggression to dedicated isolationism, fear leads both people and societies to pretty much every extreme of reaction. Still, perhaps the most unexpected result of fear is, paradoxically, an…
“I Don’t Want Any More Cracks About The Book!”: Insights for Interpreting Sacred Texts from Star Trek
Sacred books and texts loom large in human civilizations, past and present. Yet such books and texts are scarce in Star Trek. Memory Alpha’s entry on “Sacred Texts” lists exactly 16 examples from the entire franchise. Is this dearth of…
Trektember: Season 5 Preview
Welcome to the fifth season of Trektember! We’ve now run longer than Enterprise, and boy has it been a long road…gettin’ from there to here. When we first launched Trektember back in September of 2016, there was no Star Trek…
Trektember: 2019 Wrap-Up (plus: Deep Space Nine Season 8?!)
Hey, guess what? We did it, for the fourth time! (Did what? If you missed the entirety of Trektember, click here) This year’s Trektember reminded me how much I really love Deep Space Nine. It isn’t a perfect television show,…
Trektember: What You Leave Behind
In my post about this episode on my own blog, I talked about how frustrated, even angry I was about the way Deep Space Nine ended when I first saw it. But I also alluded to something beautiful in it…
Trektember: Remembering Aron Eisenberg (1969-2019)
In case you haven’t heard the news, Aron Eisenberg, the actor who played Nog and who is thus the star of this episode, has died. There have been a lot of Star Trek deaths in my lifetime: Leonard Nimoy, DeForest…