![]() ![]() ![]() In any event, Dylan has recovered from that earlier disdain, Gilmour said. “As far as I know, he never actually attended church on a regular basis.” “He’s always going on first dates but never actually settles into a long-term relationship.” However, Gilmour believes it’s “hard to answer where (Dylan) is now” religiously. He has supported the ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement, even studying at one of its yeshivas, and had his sons, Samuel Isaac Abraham and Jakob Luke, bar mitzvahed. The singer has since seemed to return to the Jewish fold. “Dylan may simply have been exploring his Judaism in parallel with Christianity,” Gilmour offers. Christian conservatives latched onto Dylan’s fame as a way of raising their own profiles and furthering their agendas, but his evangelicalism “turned a lot of people off.” “What distinguished Dylan’s experience from Stevens’ and Harrison’s was the disdain generated by his turn to religion,” Gilmour writes. ![]() While former Beatle George Harrison embraced Hinduism without fuss and singer Cat Stevens became a pious Muslim, Dylan’s public and unexpected turn to Christianity was met with wide derision. Raised Jewish, Dylan had a bar mitzvah and, after a visit to Israel in 1971, even pronounced the late far-right Rabbi Meir Kahane “a really sincere guy.” Convalescing from a motorcycle accident and leading up to the 1967 album “John Wesley Harding,” he reportedly read the Bible extensively. “And the idea that a well-known celebrity actually took religion seriously struck me as rather important.” “It was the first time I listened to anything with sustained reflection on spiritual themes,” Gilmour said in an interview. The author, 44, said he experienced something of a religious awakening at age 13 while attending a church camp, where he heard Dylan’s “Slow Train Coming,” a song born of the singer’s embrace of evangelical Christianity in 1979. Some fans gladly embrace the idea of Dylan as a secular prophet, a term vague enough to permit “a semblance of religiosity that does not actually connect the singer to a faith tradition in any way,” Gilmour writes in his recent book, “The Gospel According to Bob Dylan.”Īnd while some might bristle at linking the word “gospel” to Dylan, Gilmour calls the famous songster a “serious religious thinker,” even a “musical theologian.”ĭylan often mentions God in his songs, “and though he rarely attempts to define what the term means, he still points us toward that vague Other,” Gilmour writes. Gilmour, an associate professor of New Testament and English literature at Providence College in Manitoba, Canada, and author of the book “Gods and Guitars,” Dylan proves an irresistible subject for theological analysis. (RNS) Through the 1960s, Bob Dylan was hailed as a prophet, first of folk music, then of rock ‘n’ roll-at least by those who forgave him the heresy of having “gone electric.”īut when rock’s best-known Jew famously declared Jesus to be the answer, many fans turned on him.įor five decades, Robert Allen Zimmerman, who turns 70 on Tuesday (May 24), has shocked, mystified, baffled and intrigued fans with songs rife withbiblical references, both Jewish and Christian, and no shortage of religious imagery.įor Michael J. ![]()
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