After an initial solo album in which the young [Bob] Dylan was just finding his voice (i.e., reinventing himself from the middle-class Robert Zimmerman into a pseudo-hobo Woody Guthrie), Dylan put out two acoustic albums that forever changed popular music.

I thought that coming out was going to be the end of my religious life but actually it was the beginning. Because it only afterwards that I could be honest about who I was, what I wanted, how I understood spirituality.

All relaxation does is allow the truth to be felt. The mind is cleared, like a dirty window wiped clean, and the magnitude of what we might ordinarily take for granted inspires tears.

People should support equality because of their religion not despite it. These are the values that openness, inclusion, diversity promote. And they're directly opposed to the kind of enforced closet of certain interpretations of religion.

While [Bob] Dylan's folk fans thought he was selling out [in 1965-67], actually Dylan was lodging a stronger, deeper critique of American hypocrisy.

Unlike many Sixties rockers,[Bob] Dylan sang about getting old, about broken dreams. His return to roots music pointed the way for many of his contemporaries to forsake trying to sound 'current' and to instead make music that would stand the test of time.

Religion is commodified; the educational system is a sham; and yet,[Bob] Dylan wonders, everyone has to stand naked sometime.