{"id":10990,"date":"2024-12-24T19:27:47","date_gmt":"2024-12-24T19:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=10990"},"modified":"2024-12-24T23:02:44","modified_gmt":"2024-12-24T23:02:44","slug":"all-of-you-on-the-good-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2024\/12\/24\/all-of-you-on-the-good-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"All of You on the Good Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On Christmas Eve, 1968, Apollo 8 became the first manned spacecraft from Earth to orbit the moon. It had been a hell of a year — the Vietnam War was raging, protests and riots rocked the US and other countries as well, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated\u2026 I wouldn’t be born for another nine months, but I imagine it must have seemed as if civilization itself was on the brink. And then from a tiny vehicle about the size of a family car, all alone out there in the endless dark, came two remarkable gifts: a color photograph of the Earth rising over the surface of the moon, taken during the first moment human eyes had ever seen such a thing, and a reading of the book of Genesis by three men who were farther away from home than any human had ever been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you’ve never heard that reading — awkward, filled with static and long pauses as the astronauts passed the microphone and script between themselves, and yet achingly earnest as it reaches out across a quarter-million miles with a message of hope — I urge you to go hit YouTube and give it a listen. It’s easy to find. And it’s powerful. I’m not a religious person, but I can’t help being moved every time I hear it, especially by the sign-off, which appears on the image below. The reading was broadcast on live television all over the world, and was, at the time, the most-watched TV program ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think about that broadcast and the Earthrise photo every Christmas Eve. It seems especially poignant to me this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Christmas Eve, 1968, Apollo 8 became the first manned spacecraft from Earth to orbit the moon. It had been a hell of a year — the Vietnam War was raging, protests and riots rocked the US and other countries as well, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated\u2026 I wouldn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10990"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10994,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10990\/revisions\/10994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}