LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Ray Kurzweil may not be a household name, but the blind know who he is. He invented the first reading machine and then reduced its size to a hand-held gadget. Kurzweil will be remembered more as a man on a mission to tell the world what life will be like in the age of technology. Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates said he is the best in the world at predicting the future, and what a world he predicts.

RAY KURZWEIL: This is a design of a robotic red blood cell. We are going to put these technologies inside us, blood-cell-size devices that will augment our immune system, make us a lot healthier, destroy disease and dramatically push back human longevity, go inside our brains and actually enable us to remember things better, solve problems more effectively. We are going to become a hybrid of machine and our biological heritage. In my mind, we are not going to be transcending our humanity. We are going to be transcending our biology.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil has written several books. One of the most recent, called “The Singularity Is Near,” predicts that by the year 2050 nonbiological artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, creating a hybrid of man and technology.

KURZWEIL: What I am predicting is that we will have machines—we are going to need a different word because these are not like the machines we are used to. These are going to be machines that will seem as human, as real, as conscious, as any actual human being.

SEVERSON: Even if nonbiological or artificial intelligence created in places like MIT is not as close to “singularity” or matching human intelligence, as Kurzweil believes, it’s close enough that scientists and ethicists are now saying we need to take a serious look at its ramifications. Professor Christian Brugger is a bioethicist at Saint John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver. Brugger disagrees with Kurzweil that humans can ever come close to perfection with technology.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIAN BRUGGER (Saint. John Vianney Theological Seminary): I don’t think that the technology is the problem. What I have concerns about is the philosophy that stands behind it, the idea that somehow we are going to be able to overcome human limitation or we’re going to overcome death.

SEVERSON: What troubles Brugger the most is the notion that technology will one day replace God.

BRUGGER: If we start to think about technology as a kind of savior, is it going to overcome our misguided ambitions? Is it going to overcome those kinds of prejudices that cause us to hate our neighbor? To many of us who follow a religion, we’d say that God would help us to overcome those things.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil argues that it’s human nature for mankind to utilize technology to overcome human limitations.

KURZWEIL: We are the species that does change ourselves. We didn’t stay on the ground. We didn’t stay on the planet. We didn’t stay with the limits of our biology. If you want to speak in religious terms you can say that’s what God intended us to do.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil bases his predictions on what he calls the exponential growth of artificial intelligence in the fields of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.

KURZWEIL: Informational technology is growing exponentially, not linearly. Our intuition says it grows like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5—thirty steps later you’re at 30. The reality is that it grows 2, 4, 8, 16, and 30 steps later you are at billion.

(giving a speech): When I was a student at MIT, I went there because it was so advanced at that time it actually had a computer, and it costs tens of millions of dollars. It took up half a building. The computer that I carry around and that we all carry around is a million times less expensive. It’s a thousand times more powerful.

SEVERSON: John Donoghue is a professor of neuroscience and engineering and director of the Brown University Institute for Brain Science. He says his work has not progressed exponentially. But in only 10 years he’s been able to implant sensors in the brains of paralyzed patients enabling them to operate a computer, type, run a robotic limb simply by thinking, sending out brain signals.

PROFESSOR JOHN DONOGHUE: The value of the technology is first for people who are severely paralyzed. The first step is to give them any control at all. They can’t do anything without help from someone else. People want and feel some sense of pride in taking care of themselves so anything we can restore is a great step.

SEVERSON: Neuroscience has yielded other life altering advances. For instance, there are now over 75,000 Parkinson patients worldwide who’ve had tiny electrodes implanted in their brains. Doctors say the operation significantly reduces tremors and allows patients to rely less on medications.

KURZWEIL: By the way, nobody is picketing, protesting, oh, people putting computers in their brains—that that is somehow unnatural or defies the way things should be.

SEVERSON: Bioethicist Brugger worries that science will soon cross the line to where brain implants will not simply heal patients, but enhance their ability to think and compete.

BRUGGER: If we move in this direction of radical human enhancement, are we going to develop those who are and those who aren’t? The enhanced and the unenhanced? I mean, Lord, we can’t even find the money to get everyone braces who needs braces.

KURZWEIL: When the technologies are only affordable by the rich they actually don’t work very well. Consider mobile phones. Fifteen years ago somebody took out a mobile phone in the movie. That was a signal this person is very powerful and wealthy, and they didn’t work very well. Now 5 billion people out of 6 billion have mobile phones, and they actually work pretty well.

COLIN ANGLE (CEO of iRobot): A lot of people worry about one day there will be a knock on the door, and there will be a robot, and you would say where did that come from? And I will tell you that the future is going to be much stranger.

SEVERSON: Colin Angle is the cofounder and CEO of iRobot, better known as the creator of the Roomba, the floor cleaning robot or the PackBot robot used to disarm roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, and soon to be released—robots that can keep track of grandma and remind her when it’s time to take her meds.

ANGLE: We call it a physical avatar, and so that these robots would allow a doctor to visit a patient in their own home without ever having to leave his doctor office. These robots are meant to be surrogates for people, so the personality of the doctor will be the personality of the robot.

BRUGGER: I think that iRobots are wonderful, if they can do the vacuuming for me so I can read a good book. I’m happy with that. But iRobots are not my wife, and they are not my children. They are not even an animal.

SEVERSON: Angle doesn’t believe robots will ever replace humans, but he says notwithstanding the science fiction stories of robots run amok, society needs them.

ANGLE: Throughout history there are many different situations where technology exists and can be used for good or evil, and I think that as robots become more capable we need to be careful about using robots to help society.

DONOGHUE: The classic scary story is “The Matrix,” of course, where you plug in and you live in this other reality.

SEVERSON: The reality where computers take over the world:

(from the movie “The Matrix”): “We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.” “AI? You mean artificial intelligence?” “A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them.”

SEVERSON: Kurzweil himself worries about technology falling into the wrong hands.

KURZWEIL: The same technologies that are being used to reprogram biology away from heart disease and cancer, presumably good things, could be deployed by a bioterrorist to reprogram a biological virus to be more destructive, and that’s actually a specter that exists right now.

SEVERSON: He says he’s working with the military to develop a system to detect rogue viruses, something like the virus protection found in today’s computer software. But he sees the good society can gain from artificial intelligence far outweighing the bad.

KURZWEIL: That was the family religion. It was personalized: You, Ray, can find the ideas that will change the world.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil has patented over two dozen inventions, including the first music synthesizer, which he sold to Stevie Wonder. President Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology, and few have more faith in technology than Ray Kurzweil.

KURZWEIL: Computers are already better than humans at logical thinking. It is our emotional intelligence, the ability to be funny, to get the joke—that is the cutting edge of human intelligence. That’s the most sophisticated, complicated thing we do, and that’s exactly the heart of my prediction that these computers will match us in emotional intelligence, which includes our whole moral system.

BRUGGER: I don’t think that will ever be reached because now we are dealing in the realm of the spirit. If the entire realm of the spirit that has been spoken about in the history of poetry and literature and philosophy and theology is reducible to electrical synapse, then we can reproduce it eventually in a machine, because electricity is at the basis of the machine. I deny that premise. I think that there is more to human beings than reducible to measurable stimuli, and in that regard I don’t think that machines are ever going to be able to be human.

SEVERSON: Undaunted by his critics and skeptics, Kurzweil is so convinced that artificial intelligence will one day enable man to live forever he is doing everything he can to be around when it happens.

SONYA KURZWEIL (making a toast): Well, here’s to living forever. That’s not just a salutation in our family.

KURZWEIL: I want to live indefinitely, and actually I think we all do. People say, oh, I don’t want to live forever, 100 would be great. When they get to 100, they don’t want to die tomorrow.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil is so determined to live “indefinitely.” He takes as many as 200 supplements each day, says this regimen made it possible to reverse both his diabetes and his age. His most recent full-blown checkup results show he has the body and mind of a 40-year-old. Kurzweil is 62 and striving for immortality.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Boston.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: During this week’s debate, Mitt Romney said voters should not select candidates on the basis of their faith.

MITT ROMNEY (Presidential Candidate): That idea, that we choose people based upon their religion for public office, is what I find to be most troubling, because the founders of this country went to great length to make sure, and even put it in the Constitution, that we would not choose people who represent us in government based upon their religion.

LAWTON: Romney was responding to recent remarks by Dallas evangelical megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, who told reporters he believed that Romney, as a Mormon, is part of a “theological cult” that is not Christian. At the Values Voter Summit earlier this month, Jeffress introduced Rick Perry, referring to his evangelical faith.

REV. ROBERT JEFFRESS (First Baptist Church of Dallas): Do we want a candidate who is a good moral person, or do we want a candidate who is a born-again follower of the Lord Jesus Christ?

LAWTON: Jeffress’ comments stirred controversy, even among other religious conservatives.

WILLIAM BENNETT (Conservative Commentator): Pastor Jeffress, do not give voice to bigotry. Do not give voice to bigotry.

LAWTON: Romney’s Mormon faith was also an issue in the last presidential campaign, prompting his 2007 speech saying that while he will be true to his beliefs, they would not dictate his presidency. It’s an issue of particular concern to many evangelical voters. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, almost 60 percent of white evangelicals believe that Mormonism is not a Christian religion. Although Romney does have some high-profile evangelical supporters, it appears he still hasn’t caught on at the evangelical grassroots. But neither has Perry, who has been openly touting his evangelical faith, so much so that Perry’s wife told supporters she feels he’s come under unfair attack because of his beliefs. Meanwhile, Herman Cain, who describes himself as a conservative Christian, is also making a play for evangelical voters with several recent faith-based stops, including a book signing at the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

Evangelicals are a key GOP constituency, especially in the primary season. In 2008, 44 percent of all Republican presidential primary voters were self-identified evangelicals, with even higher percentages in several early voting states. This time around, evangelicals are still undecided. At the Values Voter Summit, Ron Paul won the straw poll, followed by Cain and Rick Santorum. Perry and Michele Bachmann tied for fourth. Romney came in sixth.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: In a region that’s seen civil wars and bloodshed, Ghana has enjoyed years of peace.

Church leader: May somebody leave this service knowing that their tomorrow is better than their today…

DE SAM LAZARO: In its packed churches there’s a palpable sense of optimism about Ghana’s future.

REV. FRED DEEGBE: I wish I could say we’ve reached the Promised Land. We are quite close to it, we believe.

DE SAM LAZARO: The first building block to Ghana’s relative prosperity has been a free press.

Radio announcer: This is your show, the unique breakfast drive….

DE SAM LAZARO: Almost everyone listens to the radio in Ghana and lively political give and take is a breakfast staple. Tempers flared close to boiling point at times in the studios but only until the show was over. All was quickly forgiven. In a continent where long-running dictatorships are the norm, Ghana has enjoyed two decades of thriving democracy. Two incumbent leaders have lost in general elections. In 2008, the margin was less than one percent. Yet on both cases the sitting president stepped aside, and power was transferred peacefully.

PROFESSOR EMMANUEL GYIMAH-BOADI (Executive Director, Ghana Center for Democratic Development): This is the first time we’ve had both economic growth and political stability and freedom.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ghana was the first African colony to gain independence back in 1957, from Britain. It had its share of autocrats and military coups until the early 90s, when long ruling military strongman Jerry Rawlins stepped aside and allowed democratic elections. Ghana has seen steady economic growth ever since. It exports gold, diamonds and cocoa beans, and now new wealth awaits.

Video announcer: In June 2007, Kosmos struck gold…

DE SAM LAZARO: Major offshore oil reserves have been found here and the first oil revenues began to flow last December. Across Africa the discovery of such riches, especially oil, has become known as the “resource curse.”

DEEGBE: Instead of having oil be a source of prosperity and progress for this nation we just allow a few people, very corrupt people, to amass this wealth and flaunt it to all of us, and we want to work towards this not being the story of Ghana.

PATRICK AWUAH: Ghana has been very fortunate to have oil after democracy and not before. Because that democracy is going to influence how Ghana manages its oil wealth.

DE SAM LAZARO: Patrick Awuah is one of a growing number of overseas Ghanaians who’ve returned. He went to college in the US, then worked at Microsoft. He started a university called Ashesi or “beginning.” Ghana’s fledgling democracy needs ethical leaders he says.

AWUAH: We’ve borrowed the model of the liberal arts and sciences as the way to do that, that teaches broad perspectives, a deep ethos, a deep concern for ethics and a specialization.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ashesi has 450 students and will soon triple that number in a new campus being built just outside the capital, Accra, with funds from the World Bank and other investors. Students and alumni we talked to echoed the school’s values

NAA AYELEYSA QUAYNOR-METTLE (Business Major, Ashesi University): You are training ethical leaders, entrepreneurs who are going to take over in terms of the integrity, in terms of sharing the national cake or the national pie among everybody so that the majority of the Ghanaian nationals are not eating the drops or the crumbs from the table, but then they are sharing equally.

DE SAM LAZARO: For now, Ghanaians are hardly sharing equally. There’s still deep poverty in rural areas, where the majority of Ghana’s 22 million people live. Development experts say the best way to attack poverty is to create jobs and improve the rural economy. A number of efforts have begun to do this. For example, shea nuts are a major export. They’re processed in Europe and America into shea butter, used in skin creams or as a food additive. Now several small processing enterprises have been set up in Ghana, supported by private aid groups as well as the US government. Some are mechanized but hundreds of women are employed in traditional processing, kneading a dough that comes from boiling and crushing the nuts to release the prized shea butter.

RITA DAMPSON (Small Business Owner): When you pick the nuts and sell, that is just the end of it, but when you process it into butter, the profit you can get to support your children by paying their school fees.

DE SAM LAZARO: So there is more profit than if you process the nuts?

DAMPSON: Yes, please.

DE SAM LAZARO: There’s a long way to go. Ninety-five percent of Ghana’s shea nuts are still exported raw, and processing is even more difficult with what is still Ghana’s chief export: cocoa beans. Very little chocolate is made anywhere in Africa because of a lack of refrigeration or milk. So the emphasis here instead is on getting a better price. Kojo Aduhene Tano and his neighbors belong to Kuapa Kokoo, Ghana’s largest cooperative. It was set up 20 years ago with the help of British aid group called Twin Trading. Its buyers have pledged to pay higher fair-trade prices. The coop even owns part of a fair trade chocolate line called Divine, sold mostly in Europe and online in the US. Nationwide, the coop has 64,000 members, and its profits have paid for community wells, credit unions, and schools. It’s hardly made anyone rich. Fair trade does not have a fair share of the chocolate market. Kuapa accounts for just five percent of cocoa growers in Ghana.

KOJO ADUHENE TANO: We need more money from you.

DE SAM LAZARO: People in rich countries need to buy more fair trade chocolate, he says, even as I discover that he got his first taste of it very recently.

(speaking to Tano): How old were you when you first tasted chocolate?

TANO: I was 48 years.

DE SAM LAZARO: You were 48 years old?

Life is still tough, but Kojo Tano is much more optimistic about the future. He only went through eighth grade, but his six children are being educated. The two oldest are away in college.

TANO: When I grow old they will look after me.

QUAYNOR-METTLE: This is the best times to be a young person in Ghana.

DE SAM LAZARO: That optimism is echoed in the capital, especially among young people.

QUAYNOR-METTLE: There’s the oil find, Vodafon has just come to settle, there’s KPMG, there’s Price-Waterhouse, there are all the giant multinational companies coming in. The opportunities are just overflowing.

DE SAM LAZARO: Whether it’s in big oil or tiny shea nuts, Ghana’s challenge will be to make the benefits flow more equitably, also to keep its commitment to democracy and freedom of information. Religious leaders in this largely Christian country will have a key role in all of this.

DEEGBE: With the advent of oil, there is a civil society oil and gas platform who are watching, who are keeping vigil over everything. There’s even a faith-based organization, coalition between the Christian Council of Ghana and the Ghana Pentecostal Council. Between those two you have a majority of Ghanaians, and we are extending that a third level to add a coalition that involves the Muslims, and what we want to do is to monitor what comes in.

Radio newsreader: The Ghana National Petroleum Corporation has for the second time lifted a total of 994,691 barrels of Jubilee crude oil …

DE SAM LAZARO: For now, oil revenues are being meticulously reported. How they should be monitored and spent is an on going debate that will escalate as elections approach in 2012.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Accra, Ghana.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s early morning at Washington Hospital Center and time for a quick prayer before Flavia Walton heads into surgery. For eight years, Flavia’s husband, Bill, has had severe kidney disease, and Flavia is donating a kidney. But her kidney isn’t going to Bill. They weren’t compatible enough—at least when it came to kidneys. So Bill had to be put on the transplant list.

BILL WALTON: You are placed on the list, and then the wait begins, and it goes on and on and on, and your only hope is you can check the list on the Internet and see if the numbers are getting any smaller. But they never do.

LAWTON: Then Bill and Flavia heard about a program known as a paired kidney exchange, where Flavia could donate her kidney to somebody else, and in exchange Bill would get a kidney from another donor who was a perfect match.

BILL WALTON: Bottom line here is you’ve got to give one to get one.

LAWTON: The Waltons were part of the world’s largest kidney swap to date, sponsored by Washington Hospital Center and Georgetown University Hospital. It involved a complex chain of 28 surgeries at four different hospitals. Most of the donors gave a kidney in order to benefit a friend or family member. But a couple of donors did it out of a sense of altruism, with no particular recipient in mind. In the end 14 patients who had been particularly hard to match received kidney transplants. The donors and recipients were introduced to each other at an emotional news conference.

RALPH WOLFE (kidney donor speaking at press conference): I love this guy. I don’t even know him, but I love him.

GARY JOHNSON (kidney recipient speaking at press conference): You can’t imagine how fortunate I feel that somebody from somewhere in the universe came and gave me a kidney.

FLAVIA WALTON (speaking at press conference): To see someone that you love most it the world deteriorate is a sense of helplessness and powerlessness that you just cannot comprehend unless you’ve been there. But to be able to do something is so empowering, but it is such a blessing.

LAWTON: More than 100,000 Americans are currently on the waiting list for an organ transplant, the vast majority of them waiting for a kidney. Over the last decade, an estimated 60,000 people died while still waiting for a transplant. Given those numbers, many experts say there is a moral obligation to encourage more people to become organ donors.

PROFESSOR ROBERT VEATCH (Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University): Just a little nudge would do enormous amounts of good in terms of saving lives and making sick people’s lives better.

LAWTON: The incentive for Flavia Walton to become an organ donor was clearly to benefit her husband of 42 years.

FLAVIA WALTON: If God could give his son for me, or for us, I could certainly give a kidney to keep someone else alive. And I certainly want to keep him around as long as possible. I don’t know if he wants to keep me around that much longer.

BILL WALTON: No, I got no complaints.

FLAVIA: Okay, okay. But no, it was not a hard decision at all.

LAWTON: Living donors are screened psychologically to ensure they are not being unduly pressured into the surgery. It is major surgery, but because of medical advances the risks to the donors are quite low. Because of these factors, Professor Veatch at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics says there are few ethical problems with kidney swaps such as the one the Waltons were part of.

VEATCH: If we can get a living donor we get a better kidney, a more viable kidney, and it shows up in the survival-rate statistics.

LAWTON: His main ethical concern with the swaps is making sure that kidney patients without a loved one willing to donate are not pushed lower on the waiting list, particularly those with hard-to-match blood types.

VEATCH: We at least want to be fair with the people on the wait list who don’t have a family member available. Being fair might mean waiting a trivial extra amount of time, but we certainly don’t want to make those people wait years extra just because of the swap arrangements.

LAWTON: While the swap program has been successful, some other strategies to encourage organ donation have run into roadblocks because of the National Organ Transplant Act, which forbids any monetary compensation for organ donation. Twenty-five years ago, Veatch testified in support of that law, but he’s now urging that it be revisited. He’s calling for experimentation with some token financial incentives. For example, he would support a modest discount on driver’s license renewals for people who sign up to be organ donors. Or, he says, there could be a question on income tax returns asking people to be donors, and even offering a tax deduction for those who say yes.

VEATCH: It sort of taints the altruism of organ donation. On the other hand, real human lives are at stake here, and I would be willing to compromise the altruism at the margins if we can really save some lives.

LAWTON: Veatch also says the religious community should do more to promote organ donation.

VEATCH: It’s considered an altruistic, charitable act, and all the major religions look favorably upon that behavior.

LAWTON: Veatch tries to counter one theological concern he hears among some conservative Christians, especially in the black church, who believe individuals will be bodily resurrected in the end times, and therefore they worry about the implications of organ donation.

VEATCH: The doctrine is when you are resurrected you will be resurrected to look like you, but with all the bad stuff fixed. So if you had cancer, the cancer won’t be there, and if organs had been procured, or consumed by fire, you will get a new version of the body.

LAWTON: Flavia Walton, who is a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, says she tries to address that theological issue in her community as well.

FLAVIA WALTON: I think that there’s some notion or some belief among many that feel that when we meet our maker, we have to meet our maker all in one piece. For me, it means I just want to meet the maker. I don’t think the maker cares whether I’m all in one piece or not. I don’t think that’s the issue.

LAWTON: The Waltons say organ donation is of particular concern to African Americans because more than 60 percent of patients who need transplants are non-white. At the same time, African Americans have a disproportionately low rate of organ donation. The Waltons hope their story can help change that.

BILL WALTON: Exposure is key, and the more we can expose to that population that it works and we’re examples of that, the more emphasis we can get out there that spread the word and let’s proceed.

LAWTON: After two years on dialysis, Bill says he can’t believe how great he feels now. He says the gift of someone else’s kidney has meant everything to him.

BILL WALTON: Life, basically. You can’t get any more basic than that—life with a little ginger thrown in, because it’s a life that is much more comfortable than what I had.

LAWTON: Flavia says donating a kidney turned out to be a spiritual experience for her, definitely worth the short time she spent recovering from surgery.

FLAVIA WALTON: Just feeling good that I’ve been able to do something and that hopefully I’ll be able to make a difference not only in the life of the recipient of my kidney, but hopefully it’ll spread, and hopefully I’ll be able to make a difference in helping other people make a decision to make a difference in the lives of others.

LAWTON: And as politicians and ethicists wrestle over how to encourage more organ donations, the Waltons hope stories like theirs will be the best incentive of all.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

“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.