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Good morning. Last night my wife and daughter, with over 70,000 others, were in Edinburgh, part of the 17 day UK leg of Taylor Swift’s record breaking global tour. I’m more of a Bob Dylan fan, but I’m intrigued by the similarities between them. Both are extraordinary storytellers and song-writers, in a way that distinguishes them as voices of a generation. In particular, Swift affirms and empowers the stories of others through her own accounts of the tragedy and joy of love, anger and tenderness, self-realisation and resistance to external labelling. Dylan on the surface is a little different. It’s not quite his style to go through 16 costume changes, encourage the swapping of friendship bracelets, or even see the audience as a community to be built. But his songs have resonated with me in similar ways - the longing for love, the grieving about the brokenness of life, and the continued journey of finding who you really are. Dylan had phases where he explicitly affirmed Christian faith in his songs, something that Swift has not done. But both intertwine religious and romantic imagery, the transcendent and the everyday. For example, Swift’s most recent The Tortured Poets Department questions big themes of right and wrong, and the nature of love by engaging them with the reality of everyday experience. Rigid religious and culturally accepted views of life are thus challenged and then enriched. This tradition goes back to the ‘Tortured Poets’ of the Psalmists whose anger and uncertainty weaves into trust and hope in God. Just as the reality of human experience can enrich understanding the divine, so the divine can enrich the understanding of human experience – raising it beyond the mundane to the significant. For Christians this is focused in the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, which former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, called ‘transcendence in the midst.’ The songs of Bob Dylan from With God on our Side to Every Grain of Sand were part of my journey to see that God can be encountered in the everyday and the everyday matters to God – not least in the pain and joy of human love. I’ll never be a Swiftie but I recognise her as a voice of a generation, particularly for women and girls. As Time magazine writer Sam Lansky noted, Swift gives those ‘who have been conditioned to accept dismissal, gaslighting, and mistreatment from a society that treats their emotions as inconsequential, permission to believe that their interior lives matter’. And this is something for me as husband, father, grandfather and privileged male theologian to take seriously.