The April Book-of-the-Month for the Bob Dylan Book Club is the just-published Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God (2024) by Jeffrey Edward Green. The author will join us! Green is a professor in Political Sciences Department at the University of Pennsylvania and the Endowed Director of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. His other books include The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy (2016) and The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship (2010). He is also the co-editor of the recently published volume, The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom (2021). Among his many articles on topics such as democracy, liberalism, and religious freedom, these two will stand out to Dylan fans: “Bob Dylan at the March on Washington: Prophet of the Bourgeoisie” and “Self-Reliance Without Self-Satisfaction: Emerson, Thoreau, Dylan and the Problem of Inaction” (go to his faculty home page for pdfs!). His degrees include BA and JD (Yale), and PhD (Harvard).

Bob Dylan: Prophet Wihtout God is a major contribution to Dylan scholarship and to our understanding of the significance and uniqueness of Bob Dylan’s work. Last year we read about the votic or prophetic voice of Dylan from the perspective on a professor of English, Raphael Falco. With Jeffrey Edward Green’s book we learn about the philosophical, political, and historic context for Dylan-as-prophet. Often I supply links to various aspects of Mr. Dylan…but, for this book, those links would have to include everything about Dylan. The book moves fluidly and easily across all of Dylan’s presentations to the world: songs, performances, interviews, reviews, films, appearances, visual art, and liner notes. With several other recent books, such as Falco’s No One to Meet: immitation and originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan (2022) and Richard Thomas’ Why Bob Dylan Matters (2017), Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God instantly estabishes itself as essential reading in the Dylan world.
Barry J. Faulk gives us an excellent overview of the book in his review for The Dylan Review.
Nick Gillespie has posted an interview with the author for Reason TV, with the title Why Bob Dylan’s Prophecies Continue to Fascinate.
Heartland’s Tim Benson interviews Green for Books with Benson.
In a Substack post, Book Club member Christopher Vanni (and advisor to the Club…consider volunteering to help steer the Book Club!) discusses the relationship of Prophet and Poet and provides a link to the very Dylan song on Rough and Rowdy Ways that, through a double negative,(“I Ain’t No False Prophet”), presents us with the very question raised by Green’s book.
AND TO CLOSE: here is your word for the day: diremption!
Our more scholarly books often employ a specialized vocabulary…or use the implied specifications and implications of better known words for particular contexts. Here is my list of words of note from Green’s Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God. Green’s context is philosophy, ethics, history, and politial theory. I developed an earlier list when we read Raphael Falco’s book No One To Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan. Falco’s context is literary cricitism and history.
—Peter White, Bob Dylan Book Club, March 2025.