Look at the stars!
In C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we meet “a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” While in Narnia, Eustace remarks, “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” A mysterious character named Ramandu quips, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” That a black sky would reveal flickering pinheads of white light has been a source of wonder to everyone with a pulse. Big screen sagas like Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Ad Astra (to the stars), and Interstellar (between stars) tap into this shared sense of awe. There’s a reason we use the word “stars” to describe people whose talents and performances leave us awestruck. Stars hold a kind of promise of adventure and intrigue and exploration. Nearly three millennia ago, King David, looking up, said, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1). Two and a half millennia ago, Plato asked, “[What] lead[s]...