Joseph Bottum of First Things is apparently quite a Bob Dylan fan—he’s recently been interviewed about the man and his music. Toward the end of the interview, the discussion turns to Dylan’s gospel music and the way he sang about God. From the interview:

I don’t know what Dylan’s religion is. But I know what the songs are about. And what Dylan reaches down into is the deep stuff of America. Down linguistically into that soil. And he pulls up these threads, these roots, and weaves them together into a song….

Dylan has reached deeper [than other musicians] into the soil, into the root stock of American rhetoric, these tropes and this language.

It’s for that reason that his gospel songs — I don’t even want to call them gospel songs — his songs about God are extraordinarily American. And he’s led there by the language itself. American language itself wants to talk about God. And if you are poet enough and songwriter enough to feel where the language wants to go, the language will take you there inevitably. It’s just that we don’t have a lot of people who are poet enough or songwriter enough to feel that.

Bottum highlights this and a few other parts of the interview here.

I don’t know enough about Dylan to comment (yes, I’m a cultural barbarian), but I figured there have got to be a few Dylan fans out there reading TC. Anyone want to step forward with their thoughts?