Blue Like Jazz: A View from the Outside

I have long believed that the Progressive/Emergent crowd trade on a bad caricature of Evangelical/Reformed Protestantism in order to dismiss it.  Straw man central, don't light that match.  Tonight, it was especially gratifying to see that opinion confirmed by a Catholic who knows her stuff.  Barbara Nicolosi knows the business of script writing and movie-making better than most. Nicolosi is the founder of Act One a program dedicated to helping Christians master the craft of storytelling in order to pursue careers in the mainstream of the entertainment industry.

Tonight on Facebook, she posted the following comments about Blue Like Jazz :

So, I walked out of Blue Like Jazz before the midpoint. It wasn't my thing. (My thing being mastery of craft united to an unusual quality of depth.) If I had to sum up what I saw of the movie I would say it is about a caricature of Christianity who encounters caricatures of secularism, and they both offer each other banality which everybody on screen seems to think is profound and presumably eventually leads to a catharsis. 

I am not going to watch any more of these movies coming out of the Christian sub-culture. It's not what I do.

 P.S. Why do some Protestants get off so much on ripping other Protestants?

And P.P.S. Uh, writer. Do your damn homework. Catholics don't use packaged plastic communion cups at Mass. Good grief.




Nice to know I'm not the only one who's been seeing the caricatures.


I think you can follow the conversation here on Facebook.

In Defense of Rush

Not really. But sort of.

Rush Limbaugh has gotten himself in trouble again, doing the same thing he's done before.  I don't know why anyone is surprised.  He seems to delight in being sensational, stirring up controversy and, in his own words, "illustrating absurdity by being absurd".  It's a trademark of sorts. So why is anyone in the least surprised that he called a professional women's rights activist who demands we pay for her birth control a "slut"?  Why?

[Just to settle the gentleman or not debate - as far as this blog is concerned anyone divorced from three wives and married to a fourth is no gentleman, whatever he says or doesn't say about an activist putting herself on the national stage  He's just not. But I wouldn't whine about not supporting his advertisers.  I don't listen to talk radio much any longer, but if I did, this wouldn't be the straw to break the camel's back shooing me away from his show.]

The only thing about this whole sordid episode that should give anyone pause is the screaming double standard here.  Sarah Palin, Laura Ingraham and others have all been called similar names and more - but did they get any call from the president to encourage them for standing up on principle?  Did any of their accusers sponsors pull their ads?  No, in fact one sponsor that has pulled their ads from the Rush Limbaugh show is still advertising on the Ed Schultz show MONTHS after he repeatedly called Laura Ingraham a slut.

You see, it's OK to call conservatives names for their views because their views are wrong, according to the kind, caring and thoughtful Left. It's OK to call yourself a slut in defiance of advice to dress modestly, when you wear it as a badge of honor. But it's not OK to call someone a slut based on their self-confessed behavior because that would be, well, it would be true and we simply cannot have that.

Slut was never a nice name.  But it has always been and remains a perfectly good name for someone demanding birth control be given to her for free.

For that reason, Rush should not have apologized.