Welcome, Patheos Readers! Please check out my review over at Patheos of a very good book, Tweeting With God. See the other reviews and discussion, and read an excerpt.

Recent posts here you may like:

• Why I Remain Catholic: the Funerals, inspired by The Anchoress’ question: Why do YOU Remain a Catholic?
• We have three new priests in the Richmond Diocese, and the Diocese has created a lovely and touching video of their ordination. By all means browse around the blog linked to there, from Fr. James Kauffmann, who made the Camino last year and has been traveling through the Silk Road.

Back here, The moon, and Venus. Just because, pretty photography; and, this is the 46th anniversary (!) of man landing on the moon. The photo below was taken just before the 20th anniversary, in 1989, in Huntsville, Alabama. These are Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins, being raised in some sort of lift, above a large crowd that had come to see them. Music was blaring and there was a laser show. The crowd was full of actual rocket scientists. We were standing behind a rope at the edge of an artificial moon crater that had been used for training during Apollo days. When the astronauts were lifted up like this a wave of something nearly like worship roared out of the crowd, rolled across the crater, and made me draw back. The yearning was understandable, but it was too close to worship.