DEBORAH POTTER (Correspondent): At first glance, the Front Porch Cafe could be any neighborhood coffee shop. But the make-shift kitchen isn’t quite up to par, and those guys at the grill aren’t your typical cooks.

JON SCYOC (Former Inmate): I actually have a small felony on my record. Well, it’s still a felony. And I know how hard it was for myself to get jobs.

THOMAS JONES (Former Inmate):Since I had my felonies I been having real poor jobs. And I chose to do street life, and street life is nothing but trouble—death, jail, or, you know, both.

POTTER: Most of the workers here are ex-offenders. The cafe is run by South Street Ministries, a Christian fellowship that also offers Bible study for inmates.

Former Inmate: What are they doing for like housing for like ex-felons?

POTTER: A place to live, a job, even just a “welcome home” are hard to come by when you’ve been where some of these men have been.

MICHAEL STARKS (Former Inmate): I’ve been arrested 117 times. I’ve been shot four times. I’ve been convicted 12 times.

PERRY CLARK (Former Inmate): We want fast money, OK? So consequently I went to prison for ten years for aggravated robbery, OK? Behind the aggravated robbery was drugs.

POTTER: Perry Clark now runs a construction business. Michael Starks is a community organizer. Both former drug users say they went straight after finding faith behind bars but that when they were locked up the churches they knew were not on their side.

STARKS: The church was of the mindset that, hey, he did wrong, he’s being punished. They thought that if you did wrong, you went to prison and that was it, and they were going to throw away the key.

CLARK: I wrote three churches to let them know, not asking for anything, that I was reentering back into the community after ten years of incarceration. And I didn’t get a response back.

POTTER: Both men are now involved in active prison ministries, helping ex-offenders rejoin the community.

CLARK: I want them to know that they can live normal life once they out.

(Speaking with woman) It’s not easy, though, when the problem is enormous.

POTTER: More than two million Americans are now imprisoned, four times as many as 30 years ago. The major reason: mandatory sentencing for non-violent crimes and drug charges. But the war on drugs, declared in the 1980s, has not had the effect its backers predicted. Arkansas Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen has seen the results.

JUDGE WENDELL GRIFFEN (Arkansas Circuit Court): Drug use has not declined. All it has done has produced an explosion on our prison population. The whole mandatory sentencing guideline mantra was sort of like the Kool-Aid that we should never have drunk.

POTTER: Behind bars, the racial disparity is striking. Black men are six times more likely to be imprisoned than whites, especially for drug offenses, even though the rate of drug use is only slightly higher for blacks. Law professor Michelle Alexander, author of the book, “The New Jim Crow,” says the nation faces a human rights nightmare more than 40 years after the end of legal segregation.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER (Author, “The New Jim Crow“): In cities like Chicago, more than half of working-age African-American men now have criminal records, and they can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. So many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind in the Jim-Crow era are suddenly legal again once you’ve been branded a felon.

POTTER: In the 1960s, ministers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were in the forefront of the civil rights movement. There’s been no similar movement to end mass incarceration.

ALEXANDER: I think Dr. King would be just so deeply saddened and appalled by what we’ve allowed to happen in this country in the years since his death.

TOM NAVIN (Social Action/Prison Ministry, Catholic Diocese of Little Rock, Ark.): We’re told to visit the prisoner, and so that goes with what we do and who we are.

POTTER: Tom Navin oversees prison ministries for the Catholic Diocese of Little Rock, but he says Jesus’ command to care for prisoners is not widely followed.

NAVIN: We’ve gotten people to be interested in prison ministry and contribute money to us and pat us on the back, but it’s really tough to get people to volunteer to go into the prison. That’s really a tough sell.

POTTER: As an ordained Baptist pastor, Judge Griffen believes churches should lead a national campaign against mass incarceration.

JUDGE GRIFFEN: We don’t recognize the God in our brothers and sisters who are in prison, and the biblical imperative is for us to see that our sisters and brothers in prison are our sisters and brothers. We owe it to God to get them out.

ALEXANDER: Just as in the days of slavery it wasn’t enough to shuttle a few to freedom, today we’ve  got to work for the abolition of the system of mass incarceration as a whole and that means, in my view, that the church has got to find its prophetic voice in the era of mass incarceration and really call on politicians and policymakers to undo the massive tragedy that has been done.

POTTER: Some legal reform is underway. States from Ohio to California have approved early release programs and lower penalties for lesser crimes, changes driven largely by the high cost of keeping so many people behind bars.

ALEXANDER: I think Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he said we have to be careful of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. If we can afford once again to lock people up en masse, nothing will prevent us from doing so if we don’t learn the most important lessons from this time, which is that none of us should be viewed as disposable. None of us should be treated as throwaway people, rounded up, locked up and then branded criminals and felons and ushered into a permanent second class status. That’s the lesson we have to learn from this time, and it’s not about saving money. It’s about saving lives, saving our own sense of humanity.

STARKS: If you got people in prison, they need to be loved, too, because if they cannot see the love of Christ, in spite of their circumstances, then they’ll never come to accept the fact that Christ cares about them at all. How can he care about me when no one from the church is in my life, no one from the church steps forward to give me an embrace?

JUDGE GRIFFEN: Talking about congregational involvement requires getting congregations to be about social change, and we in the American religious community have been very, very content to sing our way to heaven, but we have forgotten that in the Lord’s Prayer the word is “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

POTTER: Without more support from faith-based or community groups, many of these prisoners face a tough road. Within three years, national statistics say, more than a third of them will be back behind bars.

For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Akron, Ohio.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: As one pastor put it, “This is a King among presidents.” A memorial to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was unveiled in Washington this week, the first individual who’s not a president to receive such a tribute on the National Mall. A 30-foot statue lies at the heart of the granite monument that displays words from King’s writings and speeches. The choice of a Chinese sculptor and royalty payments to King’s family drew controversy and complicated the $120 million private fundraising effort. Congress authorized the monument in 1997. Despite the postponement of the memorial’s dedication because of Hurricane Irene, this weekend was still a time of reflection. Here to share his thoughts is the Reverend Dr. Robert Franklin, president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, which is also the alma mater of the late civil rights leader. Dr. Franklin, welcome.

REVEREND DR. ROBERT FRANKLIN (President, Morehouse College): Thank you.

DE SAM LAZARO: This unveiling comes at a time of serious political polarization in this country. Do you think that the monument has the potential any way to provide some healing in that divide?

FRANKLIN: I believe so, and I certainly hope so. Dr. King was a man of healing and reconciliation even in the context of calling for justice. American politics is broken today, and Dr. King’s message, his life, his values and virtues can offer us a strategy for healing what is broken. It means political opponents must never dehumanize each other. They must speak truth to power, but they must also be willing to negotiate as well as confront, and I think the King memorial will be an inspiration and a reminder that that reconciliation is possible in America.

DE SAM LAZARO: What do you think his words would be today in this political environment?

FRANKLIN: Well, that we have to listen. We have to search for common ground, something that Dr. King learned from Howard Thurman and Benjamin Mays at Morehouse College, and that it’s never appropriate to dehumanize or demonize your opponent. We must always recognize their humanity and recognize their self-interest and try to appeal to that. That’s why King was such a genius as a moral leader. He confronted, but he balanced that with negotiation, and today all I hear from so many of our public officials, religious leaders, media commentators is confront, confront and polarize. Dr. King says no, you’ve gone overboard, and there’s another side to balancing this for the common good.

DE SAM LAZARO: One of the points of contention in the debate over this monument has been the whole issue of separation of church and state and the dedication of something to someone who is not—just not even a president but also at his core was a Baptist minister. Talk a little bit about it in that context.

FRANKLIN: Well, you put your finger on a fascinating question, because we’ve grappled for the past decade-and-a-half with the question of church and state and the appropriate presence of religion in our very diverse public life. I think that Dr. King actually offers a refreshing model of how you can be a religious person, a person of faith in the public square. How? Well, he was exceedingly ecumenical and interfaith. He respected the traditions, the texts, the beliefs and practices of other people without ever disrespecting or dismissing or marginalizing them, and although King was exceedingly particular, I mean, as you say, he was a black Baptist preacher from the South, he was also always in search of what’s universal in my particularity, and I think that’s an invitation to all Americans, and when we look at that monument I hope we see King saying I’m looking for common ground, not for the basis for further polarization.

DE SAM LAZARO: Well, Dr. Franklin, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts today.

FRANKLIN: Thanks very much.

“Folk songs are evasive — the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we want it to be.” — Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One

How many personas does Bob Dylan have?

How many pages are there in a book? Or days in a year? Or, perhaps most important, how many songs in a story?

“A folk song,” Dylan wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, “Chronicles,” “has over a thousand faces, and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.”

Over the course of his long career, Bob Dylan has become one of the world’s most important cultural figures. By the sheer magnitude of his talent and duration of his survival, Dylan is now an entertainment icon and elder statesman whose Delphic riddling rhymes and gnomic puns are no longer part of the countercultural margins but are sought out by such paragons of mainstream culture as 60 Minutes and Newsweek magazine.

His influence has extended well beyond the United States and well beyond his chosen genre of songwriting to literature, film, politics, and religion. His work and his many personae are, at turns, not only insightful and inspirational, wise, difficult, and mysterious but also contradictory, inconsistent and, yes, self-serving.

As he approaches his 70th birthday on May 24, one is tempted to speculate that he is also tamed, enjoying a new kind of fame — that of the establishment. Yet such acceptance — an honorary degree from Princeton, a set of Grammys, a Kennedy Center award, among many other accolades after a decade and a half of being dismissed as passé and something of a has-been — has made Dylan no easier to understand, no easier to parse, and no less compelling a writer, one who both shapes and is shaped by the best and worst of America.

You can pick your badge of honor or outrage. He sang in Mississippi during the civil rights movement, denounced the war in Vietnam, embraced a strident and judgmental Protestant fundamentalism, lauded the poetry of the gay Beat and Buddhist poet Allen Ginsberg, condemned corporate greed, remained silent on Central America, celebrated Zionist nationalism, failed to credit members of the band on one of his major albums, and appeared in a Victoria’s Secret lingerie commercial.

As attention again focuses on him, the critical debates also rage about who he is, what his work means, and what of his vast oeuvre matters.

He is hailed, but not unanimously, as a superb songwriter and musician and lauded as one of the best poets of the second half of the 20th century. He is the subject of hundreds of academic articles, numerous college courses, and dozens of books, including literary critic Christopher Ricks’s “Dylan’s Vision of Sin” and New Testament scholar Michael J. Gilmour’s “Tangled Up in the Bible: Bob Dylan and Scripture.”. A more complete edition of his song lyrics has been published, providing both fans and scholars ready access to the songs as written (but not necessarily as performed).

Over the years, Dylan has refused to be confined to the boxes into which his fans — and sometimes critics — seek to put him, whether political, religious, or even musical. He seems almost a caricature of the American Adam, constantly reinventing his public and musical self, always ready, like Huck Finn, “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” when Aunt Sally and “sivilization” (his fans and critics) threaten to hem him in. We all should have learned by now that “he not busy being born is busy dying.”

Still, as a 21st-century version of Walt Whitman, the poet he perhaps most emulates, he has consistencies and repeated themes in his many selves and their reinventions, whether amid the radicalism of the 1960s or the religiosity of the 1980s. From his first recordings, when he was still apprenticing himself to the folk and blues traditions, religious concerns and moral motifs have permeated the work as they do those musical traditions. Religious and biblical language has been a consistent but always complex and sometimes contradictory element. As he said in a 1963 interview, “There’s mystery, magic, truth, and the Bible in great folk music. I can’t hope to touch that. But I’m going to try.”

Such language seems to run through his work in the way theologians once talked about some “red thread” versions of the Bible used to denote the words of Jesus. Religious and biblical language has been part of the many public versions of Dylan, whether political, religious, countercultural, or minstrel. He may well be among the last generation for whom biblical language is a normal part of literary allusion and discourse and not an affectation or a necessary signal of a dogmatic belief system.

Thus it is important to note that at root, as English critic Michael Gray has pointed out, Dylan is a moralist rather than the prophet many of his fans, both secular and religious, have longed for. His songs are about the struggle for a moral code, and it is, ultimately, the music that provides his religious framework. As Gray puts it in his important study of Dylan, “Song and Dance Man III,” “Along with this unfailing sense of the need for moral clarity, Dylan’s work has also been consistently characterized by a yearning for salvation. In fact the quest for salvation might well be called the central theme of Bob Dylan’s entire output. To survive, you must attain that clarity of morality: you won’t even get by without going that far, and then you must go beyond — get rescued from the chaos and purgatory and find some spiritual home.”

Dylan’s use of religious motifs and biblical imagery has sparked a host of commentaries and critical analyses, many by evangelical Christians. As fans and critics in the 1960s sought to make Dylan a spokesman for a generation involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements (a role he ultimately rejected, as he writes movingly but not always convincingly in “Chronicles”), so too many evangelicals welcomed his celebrated conversion to fundamentalist Christianity and sought to define the minstrel as minister. For a brief period after his 1978 conversion, Dylan appeared willing to play that role, sometimes preaching from the stage, just as he had, for an equally brief time, embraced the persona of himself as the reincarnation of Woody Guthrie, social critic.

For some evangelical Christian critics who were drawn to the music but not to the civil rights and peace politics of the 1960s and who dismissed Dylan’s “contemptuous insult-songs,” such as “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side,” the conversion to fundamentalist Protestantism was a vindication of their politics, an affirmation of their religion and their notion of the “prophetic.” The simplistic contempt for the “unsaved” in Dylan’s “born-again” songs (”Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One” and “Gotta Serve Somebody”) didn’t seem to bother them at all, and some even admitted to smirking at the discomfort of Dylan’s non-evangelical fans who were either puzzled or turned off by the thoroughgoing religious songs.

But the fundamentalist phase didn’t last long, either. Dylan was soon back to playing his old songs, even if he kept his public distance from their politics, and writing new material that was less strident in its religious expression. Yet it should be noted that he has not renounced or recanted the songs of his fundamentalist period any more than the songs of his political protest period. The best of both continue to be part of his repertoire.

While certainty of conviction can be a virtue in religious belief systems, it can work against creativity, which requires the artist to go beyond the last poem, the last canvas, to a new configuration. For a songwriter and performer like Dylan, there is always a new story to tell, a new way of telling the old story, and unlike dogmatic formulas, such new tellings change the meanings of the old versions.

In a famous interview with David Gates of Newsweek, Dylan put it this way: “I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me. … I find the religiosity and the philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. … I believe the songs.”

Ultimately, that is what “Chronicles” is — a kind of musical memoir rather than an autobiography. It is the past remembered and refracted through time and the imagination, not a literal reconstruction. There is very little of politics or religion or any of the other controversies that have marked Dylan’s career. For all the sense of intimacy, there is little for those seeking clues to Dylan’s “real” life — the private life — beyond the songs. Those wanting details of the 1966 motorcycle accident or the role of drugs or the Bible study at the Vineyard church won’t find much in the book. Perhaps in the promised volumes two and three.

What they will find is a warm and generous and at times exuberant reflection by Dylan on points of his pilgrimage — the first days in Greenwich Village; the making of the 1989 “Oh Mercy” album at perhaps one of the lowest points in his career after the born-again phase; his incubator time in Minneapolis, where he was exposed to many of the folk traditions that were growing in popularity.

“Chronicles” is also instructive for critics and theologians like Ricks and Gilmour, whose interpretations of Dylan’s work, while often fascinating, informative, and suggestive, are sometimes overdetermined. Dylan writes, for example, of trying to “fix” the last line of “Ring Them Bells” — “breaking down the distance between right and wrong.” Ricks stresses Dylan’s use of the word “distance” rather than “difference” between right and wrong. “This makes all the difference in the world and in the other world,” he writes.

But Dylan writes that “while the line fit, it didn’t verify what I felt. Right or wrong, like it fits in the Wanda Jackson song, or right from wrong, like the Billy Tate song, that makes sense, but not right and wrong. The concept didn’t exist in my subconscious mind. I’d always been confused about that kind of stuff, didn’t see any moral ideal played out there. The concept of being morally right or morally wrong seems to be wired to the wrong frequency.”

Reading “Chronicles” is a little bit like listening to a Dylan album. There are always stunning moments, puzzling moments, and some clinkers. The book is studded with wonderful lines that defy easy explication. Of Roy Orbison he writes: “He sang like a professional criminal.” You know it’s a compliment, but what exactly does it mean?

Among the off notes is a chapter called “The Lost Land,” which reads a little like every celebrity’s put-down of the price of fame even as they pursue it. It is cliche-ridden (”Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race”) and unconvincing (”I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper” and “what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard”). Sure, Bob. Yet there is nothing here of family, nothing of the meaning and significance of fatherhood, only the textureless assertion of the fantasy.

What shines in “Chronicles,” however, is Dylan’s warm and generous assessment of other musicians, those he learned from, those he admired, and even, like Joan Baez, those with whom he has broken. Many fans will be surprised at the wide range of his musical tastes and interests. There are, of course, the obvious folk, blues, and gospel performers such as Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and Odetta, along with his own contemporaries, especially Dave Von Ronk, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Mike Seeger. But he also expresses regard for many of the performers dismissed by folk “purists” of the 1960s, such as the Kingston Trio, and voices appreciation for the music of jazz musicians Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, and Duke Ellington, as well as pop and early rock singers such as Ricky Nelson.

Which is to say that “Chronicles,” like the person — and for good or ill — is mostly about the music and his own highs and lows in relationship to it.

“A song is like a dream,” writes Dylan, and it seems true of his long career as well, “and you try and make it come true.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor for Religion News Service.

Will historians mark this election as the passing of a generation of American leadership that preferred partisan politics to productive policies? Can the massive and euphoric following of a President Obama resist the temptation to lord it over those who didn’t see their light? Can the idealistic and visionary Obama avoid the missteps associated with the failure of that other new kind of president, the one from Georgia, to master quickly enough the labyrinth that is Washington politics? Will the flawless campaign inspire a flawless first 100 days? Will the voices heard in “the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston” continue to reach President Obama when he resides in the White House? These questions will be answered in short order, no doubt.

With a compelling popular and electoral college victory, Barack Obama can claim a clear mandate to address the economy, to restore the image of America abroad, to bring change and, perhaps much more importantly, to restore hope to a nation and a people desperately in need of it. Perhaps, just perhaps, on November 4, 2008, the nation itself somehow embodied the change we’ve heard so much about. After all, this is the same country where, less than 55 years ago, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King gave soulful voice to freedom long denied, where Emmett Till and James Reeb, so different from one another, were beaten to death for the sins of others, where Selma and Montgomery and Bull Connor and Watts each exposed the ugliness of our American experiment struggling to maintain some semblance of order while unraveling in its inner core. Do you remember the events of Grant Park just forty years ago? On election night 2008, the same park hosted a genuine “rainbow coalition” that elected the nation’s first black president. What does it all mean?

In early May 1955, as the Supreme Court carried on its hearings about how Brown v. Board of Education might be made effective, Reinhold Niebuhr noted Madison’s observation that “it was easier to guarantee liberty than equality by legal means.” In referring to Madison’s insight, Niebuhr drew attention to the fact that liberty and equality were not synonymous; one did not lead automatically to the other. One could have in one’s possession all human liberties as guaranteed by law, while not yet having achieved equality. To have equality, one had to depend upon both the mores of the community and one’s access to a fair share of economic resources, neither being easily addressed by law. Where the mores of the community assume inequality, and the economy is governed mostly by privately held interests, equality is indeed hard for some citizens to come by. That lesson has especially been driven home in recent months.

The problem of racial prejudice has always reached much deeper into cultural life than just the way it has affected the rights and liberties of individuals. The problem facing African Americans in 1955, at the beginning of the civil rights movement, was systemic, deeply woven into the cultural fabric of the nation. One might say, in fact, that racism provided the “tacking stitch” that prevented the various pieces of American culture from moving out of their place. Historically, for the vast majority of American history, it has run through the whole religious, social, economic, and political quilt of American life. For that reason, racism has never been merely a problem solely preventing liberty or rights.

The total eradication of racism and other forms of mainstream cultural hatred has always demanded more than the simple act of imprisoning offending parties or voting out legislators who have kept particular Americans from exercising their God-given rights. American culture itself has always been the culprit. Individuals have only embodied it. To right the wrong of racism and prevent the spread of hate crimes of any other sort, every aspect of American life must be transformed. Only then can genuine equality be achieved for all Americans, those defined by Obama’s victory speech as “young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled.” The election of the first black American president just might signal a significant tipping point in that process. So long, that is, that President Obama himself both remembers and heeds the biblical injunction: “From everyone to whom much is given, much will be required” (Luke 12:48).

– Mark G. Toulouse is professor of American religious history at Brite Divinity School and the author of GOD IN PUBLIC: FOUR WAYS AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY AND PUBLIC LIFE RELATE (Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). Beginning January 1, he will be principal and professor of the history of Christianity at Emmanuel College, Victoria University, in the University of Toronto.