Success with women

Yesterday I was reading a story at the Telegraph website and noticed a couple of intriguing "Editor’s Choice" headline links.

One intrigued the contrarian in me: "’Bad boys’ have more success with women."

This seemed counter-intuitive to me. Most of the women I know want good men, not "bad boys." As for the guys in my circle of male friends here in NJ, while I won’t deny we have our faults, I’m not sure we’re really what one would consider "bad boys." Yet on the whole we all seem to be pretty spectacularly successful with women: Nearly all of us are happily married to our first and only wives, all devout women and good mothers, with three to six kids. Most of our wives are committed homeschoolers. How much more success could a man possibly hope for?

Certainly I, blissfully married to a domestic and maternal goddess as I am, consider myself supremely successful on this front. (We have five, with number six on the way.) Still, could I be missing something? Could some form of "bad boy" behavior somehow give me even more success? I clicked the link.

Imagine my disappointment. "Secrets of James Bond’s success with women unravelled," the headline blared. The lede: "According to a new study, men who are narcissistic, thrill-seeking liars and all round ‘bad boys’ tend to have the greatest success finding more sexual partners."

Oh. Is that all. "More sexual partners." Talk about bait and switch. I thought it was about "more success with women." Like James flipping Bond is more "successful" with women than I am. Puh-lease.

And what’s the science behind this discovery? The story goes on:

Scientists believe that the root of their good fortune is simply that they try it on with more women, therefore by the law of averages are likely to ensnare more.

They say these type of men adopt a more predatory, scatter gun approach to conquests and have more of a desire to try new things which helps when it comes to meeting women, according to the study highlighted by New Scientist magazine.

Sooo… "bad boys" have lower standards, and the more women a guy is willing to sleep with, the more willing women he’s likely to get. Thanks for that startling news flash.

Now, here’s the kicker.

I went to the New Scientist website looking for the article. And right there, under "Latest Headlines," was the following blurb:

Church provides hope of faithful spouses
People use the religious community’s mating market to find a life partner who will provide a large family but won’t cheat, finds a study

Hey, maybe New Scientist does have something to say about "success with women" after all.

Here’s the interesting part of the story:

Weeden suggests that looking for partners within a religious community reduces the risk of adultery in couples adopting a monogamous, high-fertility mating strategy as there is a large fitness cost if the marriage fails: men risk losing substantial investment if the woman cheats; women risk being abandoned with a large brood and fewer resources to care for them.

"Religious groups make this deal more plausible to both partners," Weeden says. "You surround yourself with people who strongly believe that one of the worst things you can do is to abandon your spouse or sleep around."

Now, there’s some reductionistic nonsense here, in that the article suggests that churchgoing is largely or entirely a function of reproductive strategy. If that were the case, celibacy would be a really, really strange phenomenon.

So, did the Telegraph run this second story on why churchgoing guys have more success with women? I did a search at the Telegraph on "church" and couldn’t find it.

What I did find was that practically all recent "church"-related stories at the Telegraph were about controveries over homosexuality … particularly the recent Anglican clerical "gay wedding" flap.

Hm. Homosexuality and gay weddings … in church. And churchgoing is supposed to correlate with … reproductive strategy … Excuse me, my head hurts.

Getting back to the New Scientist story on churchgoing, the researcher observes: "Hardly any of the students in our study were regular churchgoers… but those who saw themselves as having many kids in stable marriages were the ones who were anticipating regular church attendance in the future." This, he argues, supports his reductionist interpretation that churchgoing is largely about reproductive strategy.

Yet, once again, what do we know about correlation and causation? It couldn’t possibly be, could it, that it’s the religious students who see themselves potentially with families, rather than the family-prone students who see themselves as likely church-goers?

Of course, a researcher who thinks in purely Darwinian terms would never ask that question.

Which is another way of saying that the Darwinian qua Darwinian can never fully understand religion … or success with women.

Futurist David Zach – Forward! Into the Past!

The first featured speaker at the 27th Annual G.K. Chesterton
Conference (which also marked the 100th anniversary of Chesterton’s
Orthodoxy) was David Zach, a Futurist.

Well, American Chesterton Society president Dale Ahlquist said some
things first, but graciously yielded the podium after numbers of us
began to stretch and look at our watches, while others feigned keen
interest in studying the scrap iron that adorned the walls of the
O’Shaughnessy Education Center lecture hall (I learned later that it
was a sculpture, which made me feel sad that someone has apparently blown it up. I wondered what it looked like before…?).

First of all, just the idea of hearing a professional Futurist is sort
of exciting. David Zach thinks a lot about, and gets paid to talk
about, the future. Being a solid Chestertonian, though, he thinks about
it with an eye to the past and the present. He maintains that without our most worthwhile traditions and principles, we are lost in the
future without a compass.

David Zach proposes,

"When looking at the world, you can divide much of
it into Fads, Trends or Principles. A little mantra for this is that we
should Play with Fads, Work with Trends, and Live by Principles… in modern times, we are too often Seduced by Fads, Ignorant of Trends, and Resistant to Principles.".

Like you might expect of a clever futurist, David Zach makes very
effective use of computer graphics to augment the points in his talk.
Not just slides, but little animations and such like. He is a very
engaging, energetic speaker, and great fun to watch and listen to,
though I told him in the elevator afterward that I was disappointed he
hadn’t said anything about jet packs or hover-cars.

In a little pamphlet he handed out for the talk, David Zach concludes,

"Not all principles are equally valued, just like not all change is
forward. The great struggle of our age is to define what should change
and what should stay the same."

The disease of our age is that we think that change is inherently good,
that new = better. We don’t know the value of the things we leave
behind until it’s too late.

If you’re in need of an inspiring and thought provoking speaker, you
can’t go wrong with David Zach. He was tough act to follow, which is
probably how he ended up being the only speaker that night.

Besides Dale.

David Zach, futurist – www.davidzach.com

(Visit Tim Jones’ Blog Old World Swine).

Life, Truth, Beauty, Unity – and Beer

Chesterton2Hey, Tim Jones, here.
I can’t hope to give an adequate description of my experiences at the
2008 Chesterton Conference (my first) without writing some kind of
book, I can only – by way of apology – say with Inigo Montoya "Let me
‘splain… No, there is too much… Let me sum up…".

I’ll try to sum up by giving some sense of what it was like on the
last night of the conference, after all the speakers had spoken, the
presenters had presented, the toasters toasted.

The weather was iffy in Minnesota last Saturday night, so the ending
celebration – the after-party – was moved indoors. Now, "indoors" in
this case means into a college cafeteria… not exactly the kind of
place that oozes atmosphere or encourages warm conviviality. We had
enjoyed earlier some nearly perfect evenings drinking and visiting
under the stars late into the night, but we would have to cap the
conference milling around folding tables under fluorescent light
fixtures and acoustic tile. Blecch, right?

A weird thing happened though. People began to talk, and beer and
wine and cheese were brought forth, and very quickly it began to be so
noisy that we all had to shout to be heard.

I wandered around a bit, drifting into and out of the orbits of
ongoing conversations… comparing notes with a futurist (David
Zach)… trying to get a grip on the importance of beauty (Dale
Ahlquist)… watching a very spirited discussion between an
ebullient Englishman (Joseph Pearce) who seemed to be actually
defending the legendary obtuseness of Americans to an American (Scott
Richert) who had apparently grown impatient with it. The thing is,
these last two were arguing like brothers argue. They could be perfectly honest and passionate in their argument without fear of offending the other, because (really) they loved one another. Their differences were real, but what they had in common was much more real, and made the differences safe to argue with passion, and they knew this. It was a joy to watch.

One could be tempted in such a circumstance to think "These must be
important people", but that’s not the case. It wasn’t a matter of
"important people talking about things", it was just "people talking about important
things"… the only things that ultimately matter; Life, Truth, Beauty,
Goodness, Joy – things such as that – and all of us deeply grateful for
the opportunity. It was a truly liberating thing to know that most
everyone you met – even if they were very different from you – shared
the same common root, that grounding in the love of Truth which is the
love of God. This made our differences come alive, in a way. As Dale
Ahlquist had said earlier, "We don’t strive for diversity… we just
achieve it.".

In the various talks given throughout the weekend, there had been in
the audience always a joy bubbling just under the surface, the
readiness to laugh out loud or to interrupt (like one might interrupt a
family member without rudeness or worry) with a joke or comment. These
Chestertonians were (by worldly standards) just confoundingly happy and
indefensibly content. No one has the right to be that well adjusted.

You could hardly hear yourself think for all the laughter in the cafeteria that last night.

Imagine; You are standing with a cup of home brewed beer (or wine)
in one hand, a hunk of good cheese in the other, talking with new
friends about things that really matter, surrounded by laughter. There
are children ducking in and out and under the tables, squealing and
playing hide and seek. There is a group of teens and young people (a
surprising number, to me, given that we’re spending all weekend
ostensibly talking about a dead Englishman) off in a corner where they
have cleared a sufficient space, wheeling in some kind of wild,
improvised dance, like pairs of figure skaters who wandered in from an
Olympic ice rink (a little later, the teens are flipping the younger
children upside down, or swinging them around in great, breathless
arcs).

Then a man (Mark Pilon?) produces, seemingly out of thin air, a
hammered dulcimer and sets it up in a corner and begins playing; The Rights of Man, Star of the County Down… and he’s really good. Spontaneous hoots of applause and gratitude erupt from the crowd after every tune.

It’s a delightful, almost raucous scene… good drink, friendship, music, dancing, and none of it planned (well, the drinks were
certainly planned, but you can’t leave everything to chance). This
jovial spirit just seemed to rise up out of the floor like a mist and
coalesce into little pockets and eddies of good feeling.

It reminded me for all the world of Tolkien’s descriptions of the revelry of elves. It was like being in the House of Elrond, "The Last Homely House
east of the Sea… A perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or
storytelling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant
mixture of them all. Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and
sadness.".

This was a group drawn together not so much by ideas, but by an idea… The
Idea that was in the mind of God in the beginning. We were all just
feeling around the edges of it together, and even that was – I believe
– better than any of us thought we deserved. We had had the great privilege, for three days, of learning more about this Idea, the foundational idea of creation, from  G.K. Chesterton, a
clear-eyed observer and merry servant of the Idea… the Word, the
Logos. He, I believe, had a somewhat less obstructed view of the Idea
than most. I think it’s clear he was a saint. In fact, I’m now
following the example of one of the speakers (Geir Hasnes, a towering
Norwegian) by asking Mr. Chesterton to pray for me.

I’ll try to give my impressions on some of the featured speakers in
subsequent posts. I never was much for note taking, but I hope I soaked
in enough of their brilliance to give at least a rough sketch of the
conference highlights.

Pomp and Circumstance

SDG here.

Yesterday I gave a commencement address for my parish school’s eighth-grade graduation.

I don’t remember the commencement address from my own eighth-grade graduation, but I remember my high-school commencement address. It was lame. The speaker got up there and basically admitted that she had no idea what to say, but then luckily she saw Dead Poet’s Society, so she wanted to tell us carpe diem, “Seize the day.” Good thing for that movie.

Anyway, I tried to come up with something I thought might be meaningful and relevant to students of that age, based on my experiences teaching CCD to seventh and eighth graders. I have no idea what they thought of it or whether they’ll remember it any better than I remember mine (darn, that would have been a good lead-in), but for what it’s worth, here’s what I said.

Class of 2008:

I’d like to tell you about a dream.

In this dream, you find yourself in a room with two adults. One is early 20s, a recent college graduate, living on his own (or her own), an apartment, a car. Maybe more or less where you might see yourself in ten years. Maybe your parents hope so too.

The other is older, a manager or director. It’s a job interview. And the older person is saying something to the younger one like, “This is a very responsible position. You need to be able to work on your own, without a lot of direction.”

And then a strange thing happens. The job applicant turns to you and says uncertainly, “How well do I work on my own?”

And you think, “Why ask me? I’m graduating 8th grade, going into high school. I’m not applying for the job.”

Or suppose the interviewer says, “This position requires excellent oral and written communication skills, or a good head for numbers,” or whatever it is. And then he turns to you and asks, “How well do you do in those subjects?” And again you wonder what’s going on.

Maybe you’ve played simulation computer games like Sim City or Theme Park where the lives of the characters depend on decisions you make. What if you were playing a game like that and you found out the decisions you were making were actually affecting real people, real families with children, even?

You might think, I’m not ready for that kind of responsibility. And yet the fact is that the decisions you make right now, that you will make tomorrow and next month and next year, really do have that kind of influence. Job interviews in the real world really do depend on your decisions. That twentysomething’s fate really is in your hands right now.

Some of you have probably figured out who it is. It’s you, ten years from now.

Continue reading “Pomp and Circumstance”

Aesthetic Escalator

Hey, Tim Jones, here. The following is a post I just put up at my blog, but I thought Jimmy’s readers might find of interest;

St_joseph_rb_lg
I’m going to hurriedly try to respond to some recent art posts over at
The Aesthetic Elevator, even though I can’t give them the time and
thought they deserve, right now.

First, on the art of Guy Kemper
(pictured); Here’s the long and short, for me; this represents
precisely the problem with a lot of contemporary Catholic liturgical
art, and more broadly with non-representational art… the question is
this; where couldn’t this art function just as well as it does
here (the Catholic Memorial at Ground Zero)? It would be as much at
home in the entryway to a shopping mall, or a high school, or in one of
our new, featureless contemporary church buildings. It is art devoid of
communication. It’s called "Rise". It could be called anything.

It does do one thing admirably well; it breaks up the enervating
monotony of rectangles that make up the space. It beats looking out on
the parking lot. Let’s be honest, modern architecture doesn’t make use
of repeated rectangles because the rectangle is a shape the meaning of
which we just never get tired of exploring. Rectangles are cheap and
plentiful, and curves cost money. Look at the granite slab tub at the
left. A baptismal font, or a water feature with coi fish? Generic
acoustic ceiling tiles (how daring!) and floor tiles just like I have
in my bathroom. Look, I know the architect is dealing with a limited
budget, as well as building codes, so a lot of this is simply
fore-ordained and out of his/her control. Our culture just makes dull
buildings, that’s all. In this context, the artwork is a
welcome relief from the assembly-line blankness of the space. It is
aesthetically pleasing (competently composed and harmonious) and gives
the eye something to do for a few seconds. In that sense, it performs a
function. That’s setting the bar awfully low, but there you go. Kemper
doesn’t need me to like his art… he is successful and there are
plenty of people who love this sort of thing. It functions as a
placeholder for the idea of a piece of art, and it offends (could
offend) no one.

This is the kind of art that I hope the Vatican’s Council for
Catholic Culture studiously avoids in it’s search for new talent, which
TAE notes here.

Moving on…

TAE has some thoughts
on the Catholic League’s Bill Donahue having some thoughts about the
art of some college student, who further has some novel thoughts
regarding the proper use of rosaries and other devotional items…

"Whoa, lad! That crucifix doesn’t go there!" (think Robert Mapplethorpe).

TAE makes one good point; nine times out of ten, pounding the table
about stuff like this only draws attention to it. In that sense, I
would rather that "Shoutin’ Bill" would just let things be. His heart
is in the right place, but I look forward to seeing him on the news
probably about as much as thoughtful evangelicals look forward to
seeing Jerry Falwell.

That said, how anyone could mistake the art for anything but plain,
bigoted hate speech is beyond me. The paintings are calculated to
disgust and offend, and yet TAE manages only;

"I can’t help but think he could have approached his canvases in a more deft manner."

Deft manner? Does anyone really hold out the possibility that the
artist has some genuine, thoughtful critique of the Catholic Church,
but (poor boy) chose an unfortunate way to express it? Is anyone naive
enough to suppose that the artist seethes with loathing for Catholics,
but generally thinks highly of other Christians? Do you figure that he
quite approves of Pentecostals, for instance? Yeah, and rosaries might
fly out my butt.

Let’s imagine a college art exhibit critical of gay marriage that
made it’s point by pornographically lampooning Matthew Shepard and
Harvey Milk. How many hours would it be be open before someone was
fired? Yet, this art is no different. Some adolescent wanted attention,
and his fawning professors (with the help of the Catholic League) have
obliged.

Finally, in his post on Donahue, TAE says;

Referring back to Donahue’s criticisms, perhaps he believes his own
denomination to be Divine and infallible as an institution. I’ve known
of Catholics with this attitude, although I don’t sense it’s a
prevailing conviction. If I may be so bold, this would in fact be a
naive belief, and I don’t understand how anyone could presently think
so highly of the Catholic Church in light of the recent scandals that —
unfortunately — plagued this enduring institution. No part of the Body
of Christ can say with a straight face that they or their particular
congregation has not made certain gross missteps along the way…"

This
will require another post to address, but in brief, it (unsurprisingly)
reflects what seems to be an incomplete and overly simplistic view of
what the Catholic Church believes on the subject(s)…  very similar to
what I thought Catholics believed… before I became one!

A good year for family films?

SDG here.

The last couple of years haven’t produced a lot of good family films.

Take last year. The best bets from 2007 were Ratatouille, In the Shadow of the Moon and Mr. Bean’s Holiday. After that it went downhill pretty quick.

Walden Media released a couple of okay films, Bridge to Terabithia and The Water Horse. National Treasure: Book of Secrets was diverting, and lots of people liked Enchanted, although Mrs. Decent Films’ minority report on that one has gotten a lot of positive feedback).

Then what? A string of utterly forgettable fare: Shrek the Third, Happily N’Ever Ever, Bee Movie, etc.

2006 wasn’t much better. The year’s best films, Akeelah and the Bee and Lassie, hardly made a ripple. Cars was the closest thing to a disappointment from Pixar since, like, A Bug’s Life. A few others were worth catching once: Monster House, Over the Hedge, Flushed Away and even Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (mostly for Scrat’s brilliant slapstick). After that, though, forget it.

2008, though, looks like it could be shaping up to be a better year for family films than either of the last two years, at least for quality.

It started with The Spiderwick Chronicles, a strong family thriller with goblins attacking a troubled family, which dealt with a number of daunting themes — divorce, parental abandonment, death — in surprisingly effective ways. (I’ll be reviewing it soon for the DVD release.)

Then Blue Sky Studios produced their best film to date, the delightful and gratifyingly pro-life Horton Hears a Who.

This weekend, DreamWorks Animation releases the charming, entertaining Kung Fu Panda. I seem to be in the critical mainstream in enjoying the film, though I may be among a comparative minority who, not having been bowled over by the Shrek films (1 2 3), thinks this may be DreamWorks Animation’s best CGI cartoon to date (beating out Over the Hedge, Shark Tale and Madagascar as well as the Shrek flicks).

(Note: This is not to say Kung Fu Panda is DreamWorks Animation’s best animated film — only that it is possibly (IMO) their best computer-animated film. The Prince of Egypt remains their masterpiece, and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas is the best animated swashbuckler of all time.)

The year’s most anticipated release, of course, is Pixar’s WALL*E, coming out later this month. I’ve seen advance footage from this one, and, well, let’s just say my anticipation is through the roof. If it meets my expectations, this film could power 2008 to the best family-film year since, like, 2004 and 2005 combined.

Prince Caspian, not a great film, is still a good ride. And Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is Indy’s most family-friendly outing since, like, 1981 (this being the first Indy film since the original without some sort of bedroom scene).

What else? A little off the beaten path, Son of Rambow is a flawed but endearing film that might be okay for families with older kids (the story is about two young British schoolboys in the 1980s who set out to create a homemade sequel to First Blood).

And the year’s not over.

Looking further ahead, I’m getting no vibes on 20th Century’s Space Chimps, but I’m more intrigued by Fly Me to the Moon, a Belgian English-language cartoon about houseflies stowing aboard the Apollo 11. (Neil Armstrong voices himself?! He couldn’t be bothered to participate in In the Shadow of the Moon, but he turns out for this?)

Then there’s City of Ember, a Walden Media adaptation from the director of Monster House — and the first Walden film to set off my spider-sense in a good way since, like, Holes. (I liked Because of Winn-Dixie, but I didn’t get the same vibe from it… and I’ve been ambivalent about the Narnia films.) One of Walden’s problems in recent years has always been not having the right creative team. Could this break the pattern?

What else? Could The Clone Wars possibly be worth catching? The PG-rated Brandon Fraser Journey to the Center of the Earth could be fun (I missed an early screening due to a conflict). Disney tries another home-grown CGI cartoon, yawn (Bolt). For Harry fans, December will bring The Half-Blood Prince.

Of course, not all the news has been good. Speed Racer anyone? We saw another tepid VeggieTales movie (The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything). And, yikes, DreamWorks is releasing a Madagascar sequel.

On the other hand, there are no fantasy films this year selling atheism to children, and that’s a good thing.

One way to stack up the year against other recent years is to compare this year’s films with recent counterparts.

Horton Hears a Who easily beats Blue Sky’s most recent efforts, Ice Age 2 and Robots. Kung Fu Panda stands taller than DreamWorks’ previous Shrek the Third and Over the Hedge.

Spiderwick beats out Bridge to Terabithia (or Monster House, whichever you prefer). And I probably liked Prince Caspian better than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

I’m looking forward to comparing City of Ember to The Golden Compass. And how will WALL*E stack up to Ratatouille and Cars? I have a hunch it may compare favorably indeed.

GET MY KUNG FU PANDA REVIEW. EDIT: Link fixed!

New CDF Document! New CDF Document!

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is not normally tasked with adding provisions to canon law, but under the direction of the pope, it can do whatever he wants it to.

And it has.

A new CDF document provides a latae sententiae (automatic) excommunication for those who attempt to ordain women and for those women who receive such attempted ordinations.

TEXT:

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

General Decree

On the delict of attempted sacred ordination of a woman

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in virtue of the special faculty granted to it by the Supreme Authority of the Church (cf. Can. 30, Code of Canon Law), in order to safeguard the nature and validity of the sacrament of Holy Orders, decreed, in the Ordinary Session of December 19, 2007:

In accordance with what is disposed by Can. 1378 of the Code of Canon Law, he who shall have attempted to confer holy orders on a woman, as well as the woman who may have attempted to receive Holy Orders, incurs in a latae sententiae excommunication, reserved to the Apostolic See.

If he who shall have attempted to confer Holy Orders on a woman or if the woman who shall have attempted to received Holy Orders is a faithful bound to the Code of Canons of the Oriental Churches, he is to be punished with the major excommunication, whose remission remains reserved to the Apostolic See, in accordance with can. 1443 of the same Code (cf. can. 1423, Code of Canons of the Oriental Churches).

The present decree enters in force immediately after its publication in L’Osservatore Romano.

William Cardinal Levada
Prefect
Angelo Amato, s.d.b.
Titular Archbishop of Sila
Secretary

First, HERE’S CANON 1378 IN THE CIC.

And HERE’S CANON 1443 OF THE CCEO.

Now, SOME COMMENTARY BY ED PETERS.

Finally, a few thoughts of my own:

It’s interesting, as Ed points out, that the Holy See has gone in the direction of creating a new latae sententiae penalty rather than continuing the trend of abolishing them.

On the part of bishops there may be something of a preference for latae sententiae penalties in that they do not require the bishop to himself take the action of imposing a canonical penalty on one of his subjects–an action that is bound to be portrayed in terms of the harsh disciplinarian stereotype in the popular press. It is much easier for a bishop to say "So-and-so has excommunicated himself/herself by these actions" than "I hereby excommunicate so-and-so for these actions."

I think that in this case, though, there may be an additional and perhaps more fundamental reason for the penalty (at least in the Latin rite) being a latae sententiae one: These ordinations frequently occur in secret.

That’s how they got started, after all: If the claims of the original group of female ordinands are to be believed, they found a Catholic bishop somewhere who was willing to perform the initial ordinations. That man’s identity has not been revealed.

And subsequent to that event, some of these women have simulated ordination in secret or at least without their identities initially being known to their bishops.

The use of a latae sententiae penalty in this case sends a signal that simply keeping the identities of the parties a secret will not keep them from suffering excommunication. You can’t tell yourself, if you are a bishop or a prospective ordinand, "I’m free of canonical penalties as long as nobody knows I did this so that no penalties can be imposed on me."

Instead, the latae sententiae penalty in this case says, "The Church takes this crime so seriously that it provides for excommunication even when the parties, or even the fact, of the crime are unknown."

The same can be said of all the other latae sententiae penalties, such as the excommunication provided for abortion.

One might still question whether we should have latae sententiae penalties in the Latin rite, but I think that the reason for this one is more than just a desire to get bishops "off the hook" for having to impose a penalty. It’s a sign of the Church’s particularly strong desire to alert those who attempt these ordinations to the gravity of their actions.

Since the current decree is not retroactive, it will not touch those who have previously attempted these ordinations (including the original bishop, assuming that there was one), but it does send the signal going forward to all who would participate in them.

Of Raiders and Crystal Skulls

Why RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is the greatest action–adventure film in history.

Why INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL is worth catching.

Eight years ago, before Decent Films existed, I jotted down a few quick sentences on Raiders as part of a list of 35 or so movies I particularly liked and recommended. Those sentences wound up on the first version of Decent Films, and have remained on the site ever since… until yesterday, when I finally posted a full-length review. I hope to get around to writing up Temple of Doom and Last Crusade sometime soon… I’ll have to see how it goes.

Incidentally, it occurs to me that as an "action–adventure film," Raiders straddles two overlapping but distinct genres: Not all adventure films are action films, and not all action films are adventure films.

For instance, consider Star Wars and Die Hard. Star Wars is a classic adventure story, but I wouldn’t call it an "action film." Likewise, Die Hard is one of the pinnacles of action moviemaking, but I wouldn’t call it "adventure."

Raiders, on the other hand, is clearly both action and adventure. That’s part of the reason that, while all three are four-star classics in my book (though Die Hard in particular certainly isn’t for everyone), Raiders would probably make my personal all-time top 10 list, if I ever drew one up, while Star Wars and Die Hard wouldn’t. (They’d probably make the top 100, though.)