Of all of the musical genres with which Bob Dylan has engaged in his long career, gospel is the least examined and, in many ways, the most poorly understood. To say that anything in the meticulously combed-over Dylan oeuvre has resisted interpretation may seem foolhardy. A lineage of distinguished scholars and dedicated fans has scrutinized Dylan’s musical archive, detailing his source material as well as his literary uses of the Bible and other sacred texts. Others have explored his complex engagements with Christianity, ever mindful of Dylan’s resistance to attempts to impose labels such as “born again” on his practice or theology. In general, however, discussions of Dylan and gospel tend to home in on his musical production of the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the brief but important era when he limited himself, both in the recording studio and in live shows, to songs of Christian witness. Observers of Dylan’s career tend to call the three albums he released in quick succession during this period – Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980), and Shot of Love (1981) – his “gospel” or “Christian” LPs, positing them as a musically and thematically distinct body of work. Many have regarded these albums as belonging to a creatively fallow decade (roughly 1978 to 1988) of Dylan’s career, a period bookended on one side by the albums Blood on the Tracks and Desire and on the other side by Oh Mercy (1989).