Sour Notes: Blue Like Jazz

Not surprisingly, the customer-funded movie Blue Like Jazz now touring the country is already creating a fuss within certain conservative circles.

Steve Taylor, the movie’s director, took to the show’s official site on Tumblr to explain the most current tift. Taylor’s essay was also posted on author Don Miller’s site. Taylor says the Christian Movie Establishment, (represented by the Kendricks Brothers, producers of the wildly popular Fireproof) , are out to get him and Don and their movie.

For proof, Taylor offers up:

The Executive Pastor of Sherwood Baptist (where the Kendricks Brothers movies are produced) issued what amounts to a fatwa against Blue Like Jazz when he made it known that nobody who worked on our movie would be allowed to work with them in the future.

I’ve had instances where I felt like somebody issued a fatwa against me. It’s hurtful. I’m sure Steve Taylor and Don Miller must be exhausted by now. Touring isn’t as glamorous as it seems. So maybe we ought to overlook the fatwa remark by Steve, which is both an unfortunate and inflammatory word choice. Perhaps we should take it with a grain of salt, and mark it up to passion gone astray.

But I read something by C.S. Lewis tonight that I found fitting. Lewis was speaking to the notion of creativity:

The rules for writing a good passion play or a good devotional lyric are simply the rules for writing tragedy or lyric in general: success in sacred literature depends on the same qualities of structure, suspense, variety, diction and the like which secure success in secular literature. And if we enlarge the idea of Christian Literature to include not only literature on sacred themes, but all that is written by Christians for Christians to read, then, I think Christian Literature can exist only in the same sense in which Christian cookery might exist… That is to say, its choice of dishes would be Christian. But there could be nothing specifically Christian about the actual cooking of the dishes included. Boiling an egg is the same process whether you are a Christian or a Pagan. In the same way, literature (or in this case a screenplay) written by Christians for Christians would have to avoid mendacity, cruelty, blasphemy, pornography, and the like and it would aim at edification in so far as edification was proper to the kind of work at hand.

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Don’t you just hate it when the people you admire get to fighting over how to boil eggs?