NASA

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Plug-In: NASA's amazing space images, fighting in Ukraine and the top religion stories

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Plug-In: NASA's amazing space images, fighting in Ukraine and the top religion stories

“Monsters are everywhere in the Bible — and some are even human.”

These are some of the religion headlines that caught my attention this past week.

To be honest, though, I haven’t paid as close attention to the news as I normally do.

As I previewed in the last Weekend Plug-in three weeks ago, I took off a week for vacation (I had a wonderful time seeing country shows with my sister and parents in Branson, Mo.). Then I took off a week for a reporting trip to the Chicago area.

But in the Windy City, I came down with what at first I thought were allergies. Eventually, I tested positive for COVID-19. The experience threw me for a loop. I finally tested negative Friday night. I’m feeling much better.

However, I have no doubt I’ve missed a whole lot of the best reads in the world of faith. Feel free to catch me up!

One thing I didn’t miss: those amazing first images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Think there might be a religion angle there? Enter the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner with this fascinating take:

The images raise issues for followers of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and affirm the thoughts of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, who in the 1700s imagined the possibility of galaxies beyond our own, says Harvard government professor Michael Rosen.

Religion News Service’s Claire Giangravé quotes Vatican astrophysicist Brother Guy Consolmagno:

“The science behind this telescope is our attempt to use our God-given intelligence to understand the logic of the universe,” Consolmagno wrote, adding that “the universe wouldn’t work if it weren’t logical.”


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Was Holy Communion celebrated during the first moon landing 50 years ago?

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DAVID’S QUESTION:

Do you know if it’s true Christian Communion was celebrated during the first moon landing?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Yes, though this was top-secret at the time.

Something about such momentous events makes mere mortals reach for transcendent themes. For example, media coverage of last month’s 75th anniversary of the D-Day landing featured President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous radio address leading the nation and world in a prayer that God would bless the invading Allied soldiers in the “struggle to preserve our republic, our religion and our civilization.”

Astronaut “Buzz” Aldrin performed the Christian sacrament on the moon in 1969, and revealed this in a 1970 article for the inspirational magazine Guideposts that was picked up by other media (full text here). The Communion is mentioned in the official history posted online by NASA.

At the time of the moon adventure, Aldrin was a lay elder of the Webster (Texas) Presbyterian Church and discussed ways to mark such an historic event with his pastor, Dean Woodruff. Aldrin raised the idea of Communion and Woodruff checked with Presbyterian headquarters, which said under those unusual circumstances it was proper for a solitary layman to serve himself elements that had been consecrated previously. (While Catholicism allows priests to celebrate Mass by themselves, Protestants only perform sacraments or ordinances in group worship.)

Two Sundays before liftoff, Aldrin received Communion in a private worship service. Woodruff gave him a second bit of the bread and a tiny silver chalice containing some of the wine, which he included with the personal items the astronauts were allowed to take into space.

After the Eagle landed on the moon, Aldrin asked mission control for brief radio silence. As Commander Neil Armstrong looked on, Aldrin read New Testament words of Jesus he had scrawled on a bit of paper:


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One spacey assignment: What's the story on alien life and scriptural literalism?

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One spacey assignment: What's the story on alien life and scriptural literalism?

My GetReligion posts run under the rubric "Global Wire," so I may be stepping outside my designated orbit with this one. But since our Hubble site -- excuse me, that should be humble website -- provides us near infinite space (Anyone know just how big the internet actually is?) in which to indulge ourselves, I figure, "Why not indulge?"

(Corny lede, you say? Well, excuse me.)

To get to the point, we're talking universalism. Not the sort of doctrinal universalism you might expect on a site devoted to religion journalism. I'm referring to the spacial universalism of, you know, the universe.

Why? Because of this piece spotted earlier this month on the Website of the Washington Post. How could I pass up a story headlined, "Why the Vatican doesn’t think we’ll ever meet an alien Jesus"?

The story followed July's NASA announcement that it's Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft had discovered one of the closest analogues to our own planet found to date, a planet little more than one and a half times as big in radius as Earth and called Kepler 452b. The plant, said The New York Times, "circles a sunlike star in an orbit that takes 385 days, just slightly longer than our own year, putting it firmly in the 'Goldilocks' habitable zone where the temperatures are lukewarm and suitable for liquid water on the surface -- if it has a surface."

So we're talking the possibility of organic life, no matter how primitive, of a sort recognizable to humans. 

Which brings us back to the Post, the Vatican and Jesus.


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