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I'll make this brief - thanks so much for your support, your kind comments and reading, but this Beliefnet gig comes to an end with this post.

I'm not going to offer long explanations because there really are no long, complicated reasons. In brief: I have a different kind of writing to do, a real opportunity to do it, and it's the kind of writing that requires lots of thought and focus. I thought I could do both - because I have, in a way, in the past, but for whatever reason, I can't fit it all in my brain anymore. In order to do these other things, I need to have the spectre of "gotta blog something" and "wow, this is so bloggable"  lifted from my consciousness. It just has to go!

Thanks to Steve Waldman and everyone at Beliefnet for helping me and giving me this space for a while.

It's not a big deal. I'll be around - if not here, and not daily, other places now and then.

The garden of the Lord, brethren, includes - yes, it truly includes - includes not only the roses of martyrs but also the lilies of virgins, and the ivy of married people, and the violets of widows. There is absolutely no kind of human beings, my dearly beloved, who need to despair of their vocation; Christ suffered for all. It was very truly written about him: who wishes all men to be saved, and to come to the acknowledgement of the truth.

  So let us understand how Christians ought to follow Christ, short of the shedding of blood, short of the danger of suffering death. The Apostle says, speaking of the Lord Christ, Who, though he was in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal to God. What incomparable greatness! But he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and being made in the likeness of men, and found in condition as a man. What unequalled humility!

  Christ humbled himself: you have something, Christian, to latch on to. Christ became obedient. Why do you behave proudly? After running the course of these humiliations and laying death low, Christ ascended into heaven: let us follow him there. Let us listen to the Apostle telling us, If you have risen with Christ, savour the things that are above us, seated at God's right hand.

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The Pope explores it today, via the saints:

Recalling some saints whose memory is celebrated in the weeks to come, Benedict XVI affirmed that they are witness to a "Christian humanism" that differs deeply from an "atheistic humanism".

The Saints - the pope cited in particular the martyrs Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein - are indeed witnesses of "an antithesis which spans history, but at the end of the second millennium, with the contemporary nihilism, we have come to a crucial point, as major writers and thinkers have perceived, and as events have amply demonstrated. "

Edith Stein - explained the pope - was "born in the Jewish faith and was won over by Christ in adulthood, she became a Carmelite nun and sealed her life with martyrdom", St. Maximilian Kolbe, is a "son of Poland and St. Francis of Assisi, a great apostle of Mary Immaculate". Both are martyrs killed in Auschwitz.  

"The Nazi concentration camp - he added - as every death camp, can be considered an extreme symbol of evil, of the hell that comes to earth when man forgets God, and when He is replaced, usurping from Him the right to decide what is good and what is evil, to give life and or to take life. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not confined to the death camp. It is rather the culmination of an extensive and widespread reality of often nebulous boundaries. "

This reality is precisely the antithesis that became clear at the end of the second millennium, "the opposition between atheistic humanism and Christian humanism, between holiness and nihilism".  

"On the one hand - continued the pope - there are philosophies and ideologies, but also on an increasing scale ways of thinking and acting, which extol the freedom of man as the only principle, as an alternative to God, and thus transform man into a god, whose system behaviour is of an arbitrary nature. On the other hand, we note the saints, who, practicing the gospel of love, make reason of their hope, they show the true face of God who is Love, and at the same time, the true face of man, created in image and likeness of God. "

.....I was an astronaut?"

Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas,  who chronicled his reversion to Catholicism in Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith (#253 on my stack....), is setting his sights on Guadalupe:

The writer whose credits include the sexually explicit megabomb "Showgirls" plans an original screenplay on the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icon of the Virgin Mary that supposedly appeared to a Mexican peasant in the 16th century.

Once notorious as a heavy boozer and smoker in Hollywood, Eszterhas overcame his addictive habits and found God after he was diagnosed with throat cancer.

"This is a labor of love for me," Eszterhas said. "I have been hoping for some time to write a film that is both entertaining and inspiring."

Eszterhas' as-yet-untitled Guadalupe project is being written for Mpower Pictures, founded by producer Stephen McEveety, whose credits include Mel Gibson's religious blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ."

Sandro Magister writes:

They threw stones, burned homes, and pursued  those fleeing, firing wildly. In the end, nine people were dead. Seven of them have the same last name, Hamid, and belong to the same family clan as Fr. Hussein Younis, a Franciscan. They include two children (in the photo by Saqib Khadim, the coffins). Their only fault is that they were Christian.

It took place in Pakistan, in Gojra, in the province of Faisalabad in eastern Punjab. There are 1.3 million Catholics in all of Pakistan, and the same number of Christians of other denominations, out of a population of 160 million, almost entirely Muslim. But the intolerance against this small, poor, peaceful minority has become a fact of life, exploding at times into bloody aggression.

The latest episode was sparked by an innocent marriage celebration among Christians in Koriyan, a little village near Gojra. It was July 30. Interviewed by Lorenzo Cremonesi for "Corriere della Sera" on August 3, Fr. Younis recounts:

"As is customary, at the end of the ceremony in the church the guests tossed flowers, rice, a few coins as tokens of prosperity, and slips of paper with greetings or prayers written on them. The problem is that some Muslims started to claim that the slips of paper were pages torn out of the Qur'an, an extremely serious offense for Islam and even more serious in these times of fanaticism. Very soon insults and accusations were flying, and then stones. A few homes were set on fire in the afternoon. But the more serious violence exploded on the morning of Saturday, August 1, in Gojra, around the Christian neighborhood.

"Our people counted eight buses full of extremists who had come from outside the area. Unfamiliar faces, people armed to the teeth. Their slogan was that we Christians have the same religion as the American soldiers, and therefore we are enemies, we deserve death. First they threw stones, then they sprayed gasoline, and finally came machine gun fire and bombs. Here around me everything is burned, charred. The death toll could have been much worse if the Christians had not fled immediately. My relatives were not fast enough, and they were burned alive, trapped in the flames."

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