Diana Butler Bass: To Boldly Go Where Progressives Forgot to Go.... - Progressive Revival

To Boldly Go Where Progressives Forgot to Go.... - Progressive Revival: "I have to confess: Although I'm not a complete trekkie, I once played Nurse Sistine Chapel in a homemade Star Trek flick. But you don't have to be a hard-core trekker to love Star Trek and 'get' it. There are probably about a million answers to the anchor's question to the 'why' of Star Trek.

My 'why' relates to--perhaps not unsurprisingly to my readers--theology. And it doesn't fit in a tweet. When I was growing up in Baltimore in the 1960s, the world was falling apart, people divided, anger in the streets, riots ripping through neighborhoods. Yet, every week, my mother would sit my brother, sister, and me on a blanket in the living room to watch Star Trek. There, on the screen of our new color TV (with twelve channels!), an unfailingly optimistic view of the universe unfolded in front of us. Unlike the world we knew, full of fear and worries of atomic holocaust, Kirk and Spock took us to a place where few dared to go in the mid-1960s--a hopeful future."