Doxacast Remix

2025 Doxacon speakers Jake Reed and Jon James join host Cindy Collins Smith to talk about one of literature’s most enduring tropes - the Wasteland. From crippling famines to post-apocalyptic fallout, the Wasteland has led pagans to offer sacrifice and moderns to despair. But it can also lead us to seek God. Covering ground from Oedipus Rex and Grail legends to A Canticle for Leibowitz and Fallout, this episode challenges us to let God transform the wastelands in our own lives.

What can a seemingly fluffy animated feature reveal to its audience about guilt, confession, restoration, uncovering shame, and -yeah- fighting demons? In this episode, Sr. Allison Regina Gliot and Sr. Orianne Pietra Rene Dyck join host Cindy Collins Smith for an exuberant conversation covering these topics and more in the breakout streaming hit K-Pop Demon Hunters.

2025 Doxacon speaker Richard Strube joins host Cindy Collins Smith to illumine the moral conundrums, thematic innovations, deft and heavy-handed storytelling, and memorable appearances in a handful of favorite (and not-so-favorite) episodes from Star Trek’s The Original Series and The Next Generation. Sprinkled with anecdotes and analysis, the conversation takes us from the heights of The City on the Edge of Forever and Darmok to the lows of The Omega Glory and many points between.

2025 Doxacon Lay Keynote speaker M.R. Leonard joins host Cindy Collins Smith to discuss his first contact novel Pilgrims and some “must see / must watch” science fiction. Along the way, the conversation turns to influences on the novel, what would happen if Catholic (or Orthodox) aliens visited Earth, why secular-oriented gamers fell in love with an overtly Christian novel, and how we can baptize the culture through reclaiming the science fiction space.

Our Babylon 5 panel takes on the final batch of season 1 episodes, as Babylon 5 transitions from a monster-of-the-week show into a cohesive multi-season narrative. Factions heat up; conspiracies and betrayals unfold; characters retreat to the garden to contemplate their choices. And just as one of our principals is pricked by conscience, he is met by a terrible temptation.

In a conversation ranging from City on the Edge of Forever and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to Agent of Byzantium and The Man in the High Castle, Dn. Nicholas Dujmovic joins host Cindy Collins Smith to revisit his talk from the 2015 Doxacon and discuss more recent developments in the Alternative History subgenre - raising questions like “What can we learn from Alternative History?” and more importantly “What can we as Christians gain from it?”

Slides for the original 2015 talk (Copy and paste link into your browser):

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fD6-lUq0kH5UGEZ7pGTHkQV9RuXmtBiS/edit?slide=id.p1#slide=id.p1

Doxacon’s 2025 Clergy Keynote Speaker joins host Cindy Collins Smith - and it’s Fr. Evan Cummings! Fr. Evan offers context for his upcoming talk on apocalypse in Magic: The Gathering before settling into a lengthier conversation on The Legend of Zelda’s Tears of the Kingdom (2023). Amid Hyrule’s restoration after the Great Calamity, a new apocalyptic event occurs - The Upheaval, when a mummified Ganondorf revives and unleashes new horrors on the devastated Kingdom. Tears of the Kingdom expands on the theme of sacrifice so prevalent in Breath of the Wild (2017), while also exploring themes of newness and hope, the duties of leadership, and the restorative power of sacred light.

Our Babylon 5 panel picks up the conversation from the first half, discussing humorous moments and product placement, repentance, forgiveness, and spiritual seeking. As we delve deeper into Mr. Morden’s question “What Do You Want?," we consider the motivations of this friendly yet sinister emissary and speculate on the identity of his associates.

Our Babylon 5 panel returns to tackle the middle batch of episodes from season 1 (Deathwalker to Eyes). Though this batch divides viewers, our panelists dive into the issues it raises about prejudice, mortality and immortality, medical ethics, the validity of belief, and the all-important question “What Do You Want?”

Paulist priest Fr. Evan Cummings returns as he and host Cindy Collins Smith delve into two of The Legend of Zelda’s most beloved entries: The Ocarina of Time (1998) and Breath of the Wild (2017). Though nearly two decades separate these masterpieces, both find hope amid a post-apocalyptic world, and in both our heroes sacrifice themselves - descending into types of death to save the Kingdom.